By Thompson ABISOLA
The National Directorate of Employment (NDE) has said that over 5,000 trained unemployed youths in Zamfara will benefit from the Federal Government’s entrepreneurship soft loans.
The state NDE Coordinator, Mr Muhammad Alhassan, made this known in Gusau on Tuesday while briefing officials of the Ministry for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs.
The officials were led by the Commissioner, Alhaji Bello-Dankande and the local government council chairmen of the state.
Alhassan said that thousands of unemployed youths from the 14 local government areas had been trained over the years by the NDE but they remained redundant due to lack of financial support to start their own businesses.
“As we are aware, the Federal Government, under President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, came up with a policy that all commercial banks in the country should give five per cent of their profit as loan for youth entrepreneurship development.
“Under this programme, each of the beneficiaries can access between N1 million and N10 million as loan.
“We plan to train the unemployed youths across the state at the various local government headquarters on this programme. “We are here to seek for logistics support from the 14 council chairmen to this programme.
“We are starting the training very soon which is going to be conducted at local government headquarters of each of the 14 councils.
“But due to security reasons, we are going to merge some local governments especially Zurmi, Shinkafi and Birnin-magaji; their training would take place in Kaura-Namoda town.
“For Maradun, Bakura and Talata-Mafara local governments, their training is going to hold in Talata-Mafara town.
Earlier, Bello-Dankande described the partnership between the ministry and the NDE as cordial.
Dankande gave an assurance of the ministry’s support to any programme targeted toward improving the future of the youths of the state.
