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| Poverty Alleviation Programs in Nigeria: A Study of Youth Enterprise with Innovation in Nigeria (YOUW?N) Under Jonathan Administration, 2011-2015
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Mbah, Clement Chukwu (Ph.D) and Udegbunam, Cyprian Uche
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Abstract:
Poverty is one of the forces militating against the social and economic development of Nigeria. The level of poverty in Nigeria is astronomically high and politically embarrassing considering the enormous human and material resources the country is endowed with and despite the huge resources successive governments have committed to alleviate and or eradicate poverty, it seems no success has been achieved. While so many attempts have been made by different governments to engage its teeming unemployed youths in public and private services, the Youth enterprise With Innovation in Nigeria (YOUW?N) was yet another employment generation strategy of the government but this time with the aim of igniting entrepreneurship potentials of the Nigerian youth population to enable them create job for themselves. This study attempts to assess the strengths and weaknesses of this laudable initiative of the Jonathan administration in order to find out if the program succeeded in achieving its major objective to create 80,000-110,000 jobs for the unemployed Nigerian youths ages 18-45 years. The method of study adopted by the study was historical/descriptive research while incrementalist theory was its analytic framework. The study discovered that the YOUW?N program though noble and pragmatic did not succeed in achieving its major objective at the expiration of the Jonathan regime in 2015 because of near absence of infrastructural facilities that should have aided the achievement of long term objectives of the policy. The policy was also found to be politically overpromising and elitist in nature. However, it was discovered that the programd satisfactorily trained 18,000 youth entrepreneurs age 18-45 years far above its promised number of 6,000 which was quite impressive. The study therefore, recommends that government should first of all fix the country's social infrastructure and ensure that future programs of poverty alleviation like YOUW?N are well designed, evaluated and monitored before they are implemented in order to achieve their objective for national development.
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