Mr Bright Jaja is the CEO and Founder of iCreate Evolution Africa Ltd and Skillers Pro Ltd. In this interview, he said Skillers, a digital construction solutions platform that connects skilled workers within the construction sector to gainful employment, has revolutionalised the sector. Excerpts:
You have been making efforts to bridge the skills gap in the construction and real estate sector in Nigeria by organizing events to that effect. So far, have your efforts paid off?
We have a platform called Skillers which is a digital development platform for skilled workforce. What the platform does is formalise the process of hiring and firing artisans. There is a huge skill gap in the construction industry and one of the reasons why the gap exists is because of the informality, and also the negative perception of the trade; and this has caused a lot of young people not to find interest in choosing a career path in it.
So what we did was to come up with a project that changed the negative perception and that was when we designed the iCreate Skills Festival where we had young people from all over Nigeria come to showcase their various skills. After the Abuja edition, we had other editions in Lagos, Kaduna and Enugu.
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Then we moved forward to building the capacity of the artisans but the issue still remains; which is not just the negative perception, but the fact that most of the people in this industry, the artisans do not have enough success stories to encourage young people to say I want to be a plumber, a tiler or a carpenter.
Their socio-economic status is not encouraging enough to convince another young person to take artisanship as a career path. So we focused on solving that problem by creating the Skillers platform which now formalises how they get jobs.
One of the biggest economic challenges we have is if you don’t know anybody you cannot get a job. That means jobs in this sector may not come consistently and if one gets a job today, one may not get for the next one or two months. That is why their lifestyle is not encouraging and even parents do not advise their children to take this career path.
But with the platform that we have created, they get jobs consistently. What this platform does is it recruits, trains and onboard them. Then we advertise the platform to the clients who reach out to us to give them the artisans they need for their projects.
Two months ago, we decided to make celebrities out of these artisans, so we produced a reality show during the fifth edition of the iCreate Skills Fest and we invited Ghana, Togo and Benin Republic to come and compete with Nigeria, and by October it will be released.
Why and when did you get interested in this aspect of human development?
For me, the why is the rate of youth unemployment in the country. My journey in this sector started when insurgency started and there was a lot of poverty in the country. That’s when I found out the huge opportunities in skills development.
If you look at our system, it does not encourage people to learn trades, everybody wants to go to university and that has created a disconnect between our educational system and the job market.
Lawyers, accountants, doctors and other professionals are important but how many jobs are available in those professions in this country? We are over 200 million people, who are going to build our houses, who is going to fix our cars, who is going to make our clothes?
There is a clear market and a clear demand that government, the private sector and everyone needs to come together and formalise the sector as a means of tackling the unemployment in the country.
What has been the response of stakeholders to what you have been doing, especially professional bodies in the built environment?
For them, this is a welcome idea, especially in the standard and the way we are approaching the project. The last project we did, the winners got paid $100,000 and the production level was high-class.
We have been partnering with Nigerian Institute of Architects (NIA), Nigerian Institute of Builders (NIOB) and even the Nigeria Society of Engineers (NSE). They have been a major part of the project and they send their representatives to our events. Even the real estate companies are now coming to us to identify skilled workers.
Right now we have over 15, 000 artisans that are making good money through the platform. The impact has been so huge.
A major problem for the real estate and construction sector is that of building collapse. Are you training artisans that will solve this problem once and for all?
Definitely. This is one of the solutions that our platform has been providing. This problem comes from two different angles, and the first is the regulators. The people that are to make sure that the builders meet all the standards and they don’t cut corners. But because of corruption, people cut corners. The second problem is developers look for cheap labour.
Now on our platform, we have a standard that we don’t go below. We have contractors and developers that come to our platform to get qualified and certified workers who deliver on high-quality projects. But it is beyond our organization to control real estate developers who cut corners and look for cheap labour.
Are you having developers and contractors running away from your trained artisans because they can’t pay them?
That’s not been our problem because like I said, there are different levels of clients. There are clients who want to build proper houses and they want to build integrity for their companies so they come for our artisans. Also understand this, most times, when you use artisans that don’t have the skills, you end up spending more money.
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