The Industrial Training Fund (ITF) spends about N6 billion in 2 years on the Student’s Industrial Work Experience Scheme (SIWES), the Director General of the fund, Sir Joseph Ari said.
Ari said the fund under had since 2016 disbursed N3.5bn per annum on the training of tertiary institution students to facilitate performance and assessment.
The DG made this known yesterday, when he addressed a world press conference in Abuja.
He said “Over 150,000 Nigerians have acquired vocational and technical skills either as paid employees or as entrepreneurs, through the National Industrial Skill Development Programme (NISDP), Women Skills Empowerment Programme (WOSEP), Skills Training Empowerment Programme (STEPP-C) and the Construction Skills Empowerment Programme organized by ITF.”
He said ITF has reduced the technical skills programme from ten to three focus areas, which include welding and fabrication, tailoring and fashion, designing, plumbing and pipefitting.
He said the fund intends to train 13,000 Nigerians within a 5 month period out of which 11,110 youths would be trained under the National Industrial Skill Development Programme (NISDP), 360 women would be trained under Women Skills Empowerment Programme (WOSEP) saying the training was basically on need assessment, where unemployed youths and women are trained to set up their own businesses afterwards.