Edo State Governor, Godwin Obaseki has declared that his administration would immediately focus its efforts on addressing the challenge of youth unemployment in the state. The governor made the pledge while receiving members of the State House of Assembly who visited him at the Government House, Benin City.

He said with the foundation that had been laid by the All Progressives Congress (APC) government in the state in the last eight years, all was set for a smooth take off of the next phase of the socio-economic development of the state.

He said: “First, we must recover our society. We are likely to lose our society if we do not begin to emphasis those key issues of human development and economic empowerment. We have too many young men and women in our own estimate between half a million to 3 quarter of a million, between the ages of 15 to 30, who have nothing doing.”

Governor Obaseki stressed that the solution to the challenge of so many jobless young people, was to begin the task of immediately creating jobs.

He noted that in line with the promise made on the campaign trail, jobs will be created to drastically reduce the number of unemployed young people in the state. He noted that one way to reduce unemployment in the state was to revamp technical education, so that young people could acquire the skills to get into several sectors of the economy.

“We promised a minimum of 200,000 jobs and to do that, we first have to understand our direction and the challenges we face in terms of unemployment.

“On Monday, we went to Benin Technical College which was established 40 years ago to champion technical and vocational training for young men and women. The challenges are enormous because what we saw was pitiable and even though we have an obvious task, we are not daunted at all.

“So, we will, using this institution to quickly understand what we need to do and the investments we need to make. To create the platform, put a lot of our young people through training so that they can be employed in the businesses that we are attracting to this state.”