Dipo Olowookere
By Dipo Olowookere
Not less than 325 corps members serving across the country have been given credit facilities worth N540 million by the Bank of Industry (BoI).
This disclosure was made last Friday by the Director-General of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), Brig-Gen Shuaibu Ibrahim, during a chat with the media in Abuja.
According to him, this amount was disbursed to beneficiaries who are entrepreneurs under the scheme’s Graduate Empowerment Fund.
He said further that a total of 1,132,409 corps members have so far been equipped with Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) package of the scheme.
Continuing, he said another N15 million was shared to seven corps members by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in partnership with Heritage Bank under the NYSC/ CBN Youth Entrepreneurship Development Programme (YEDP).
“The SAED was established in 2012 with the mandate to drive the scheme’s collaboration with various stakeholders toward addressing the problem of graduate youth unemployment.
“The scheme is collaborating with national and international organisations toward providing material, technical and financial support for the programme.
“So far, 1,132,409 corps members have been sensitised and over 70,000 have undergone various forms of skills training,” he said.
“The BoI-NYSC Graduate Empowerment Fund, which is a product of our partnership with the Bank of Industry, is yielding encouraging results with the sum of over N540 million so far disbursed as loans to 325 corps entrepreneurs,” the NYSC boss added.
