December 21, 2015 will remain memorable to the over 500 unemployed youths and graduates across the length and breadth of the FCT, who have been receiving free training on tourism and travel as they received N100, 000 each as free takeoff grant for Small Medium Enterprises SMES.
A programme initiated by Vikonigeria for youth empowerment, is a roadmap to create five million new jobs in Nigeria through tourism service delivery value chain.
While speaking at cash reward and take-off grant event in Abuja on Monday, the Coordinator Consolidated Alliance and Managing Director of Vikonigeria Limited Group Mr. Lucky Chidi Kanu, noted that empowerment remains the only means to eradicate poverty in the society.
He maintained that in the world today, every one job out of 11 comes from tourism, adding that tourism and travel is the only sector that adds more money to global economy.
According to him, today, we have a total of 500 young Nigerians on N100, 000 each to start their business on their own in tourism such as hotel booking, interstate bus booking, check-in, departures, amongst others.
He said: “No interest is attached, we are not requesting them to return the money, and we want them to be a boss on their own.
“That is why the take-off grant is not in form of cash for them not to spend it anyhow but it’s in the form of grant worth of 100,000 pin code to activate their e-wallet.”
He added: “Creating employment is the brain behind this laudable project, which people will be self-employed not relying on government. As at today, oil price is about 26 dollar per barrel and if it continues like this, it means we will have problem, so it’s better we change tactics, which is why we are diverting to the tourism because for me tourism is about job creation.
“So, we want to teach the people how they can be an entrepreneur on their own, we create a website for them for free, do a customized mobile app and they go about trading on the tourism product without paying us any money, all what we are asking government is enabling environment, if they understand what we are doing for the country.
“Because our plan is to create one million job per year and we are not asking for money from government all we need is friendly environment that will help us to strive, the youth we trained today we did not receive a dime from government, all we demand from them is facilities where these people can be trained and I can bet it with you, we will train them on what to do to fetch them up to N200, 000 monthly.
Meanwhile, one of the ‘trainee trainers’ who trained 127 youths in just three months was rewarded with N500, 000 cash price for the hard work while the first and second runner up smiled home with N250,000 and N100,000 respectively.