Nigeria Content Online

The federal
government has concluded plans to develop a database of all unemployed
persons in Nigeria, the minister of labour and productivity,
Chukwuemeka Wogu, has said.

The minister said
registering the unemployed in the country is necessary because nobody
knows the number of Nigerians that are unemployed, and planning
activity has been based on extrapolation. He said when this is
completed, employers will have easy access to labour while the platform
will be very useful for all activities in economic planning.

“Unemployment has
been a major problem in the country and has impeded on economic growth
of the nation,” he said. “It is a global problem now since both
emerging and established economies are battling with problems of
unemployment which has been worsened by the fact of global recession
which has been there for some time now. Inasmuch as we agree that there
is a high incidence of unemployment; nobody has been able to have an
approximate knowledge of the figure not to talk about exactitude though
you cannot have the exact figure. We do not have that. It is only
recently that the minister of finance said it is 19 per cent based on
National Bureau of Statistics information. So because of this
inaccurate data, we now went into registration of unemployed people and
to have a data base on it.”

Mr. Wogu explained
that an implementation committee, which comprises members from
government ministries, private sector and technical experts on ICT, was
set up to articulate this project and had submitted a report which
indicates that the first stage of the project will involve the
designing of an architectural platform that would be the basis for the
data base.

“The essence of the
data base is to capture at least 90 per cent of the unemployed people
through various means of data capturing using facilities that are
already in existence, which are state offices of the labour ministry
and National Directorate of Employment,” he said.

Abuja pilot project

When the
architectural platform is established, the next step will be the
development and deployment of publicity modules, followed by the
recruitment and training of frontline operators and monitoring officers
who do the registration and also help determine the situation of the
unemployed persons.

“The last issues
are output and analysis of the data and issuing of reports. Tied to
this is an outline of major deliverables we intend to achieve. After
this is the major activity which now has a timeline,” he said.

The minister equally said that a pilot of this project will start
off soon in FCT, after which other states will be covered. To avoid
double registration, the ministry said it plans to introduce some
biometrics in the process, even as it indicated its determination to
collaborate with the National Planning Commission and the National
Bureau of Statistics in this project.