The design and impact of an apprenticeship-based entrepreneurship intervention in Nigeria

This project is one of eight funded within the Boosting Decent Employment for Africa’s Youth initiative. The focus is on how to stimulate and sustain private economic activity in the form of new businesses among young persons in Africa's most populous country – Nigeria. The premise is simple: private economic activity, particularly entrepreneurship, helps in reducing the burden of unemployment, which is currently one of Africa's major development concerns. In Nigeria, the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme requires every Nigerian graduate under the age of 30 years to undergo a one-year mandatory national service. Around 300,000 fresh university and polytechnic graduates are mobilised under this scheme annually. In 2012, the Skill Acquisition & Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) programme was introduced as a component of the NYSC scheme. Under SAED, each graduate is first trained for three weeks, then left to decide whether to become an apprentice and learn to run a business or not. We view this as a sequential apprenticeship policy design involving a compulsory training/awareness phase and then a voluntary uptake phase. This project set out to determine whether the sequential apprenticeship policy approach leads to a higher incidence of new and high-quality businesses. If it does, then we can claim that an apprenticeship-based intervention is helpful in reducing the burden of unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa. Otherwise, a new approach needs to be designed. The project experiments with the use of nudges via mobile text messages as a possible policy innovation. This helps to provide rigorous evidence to support the design of employment interventions, thereby contributing to the achievement of SDG 8 in Nigeria. This project is implemented as a partnership between the Centre for Gender and Social Policy Studies (CGSPS) and the National Centre for Technology Management (NACETEM).