Oyo Government Reveals Three Thematic Areas To Improve State Indices On Human Capital Development

Oyo State government has hinted on plans to draw up a comprehensive work plan across three thematic areas that would improve the state indices on human capital development

The Executive Assistant to the Governor and State Focal Person on Human Capital Development (HCD), Revd Idowu Ogedengbe, disclosed this shortly after a meeting of the Human Capital Development Technical Working Group (TWG). The technical workshop was held with senior career officers within the Oyo State Civil Service and it had the South West Consultant for the National Human Capital Development Program, Dr Dayo Adeyanju, in attendance.

The Executive Assistant listed the Thematic Areas of the HCD to include Health and Nutrition, Education and Labour Force Participation. He noted that as soon as a work plan had been generated, interventions would be rolled out leveraging the National Human Capital Development (NHCD) partners to improve the general wellbeing of the people in Oyo State.

He further hinted that the challenges of funding the Program would be mitigated by a mix of budgetary allocation and contributions from development partners within and outside the country.

In his remark, the South West HCD Consultant, Dr. Dayo Adeyanju explained that the National Human Capital Development (NHCD) was launched in 2018 by the National Economic Council as a result of observed decline in human capital development rating in Nigeria, adding that Oyo state would experience better interventions as a result of the initiative.

Dr Adeyanju also stressed that the program was aimed at addressing poverty and providing sustainable development policies, increase HCD investments, improve Human Development Indices (HDIs) across board while conceiving various steps towards accelerating human capital development.

Ogedengbe said: “For example, there is the need to ensure that we have domestic skilled labour force that could partake in businesses or contracts whether they are awarded to firms in Lagos or China. How do we ensure that our own indigenes and citizens, our residents have the competence add value and make impact. It is very important. Apart from enhancing local content, we are also interested in ensuring technology transfer to our people as well.

He continued: “When we bring in someone with skills, technology or special expertise, how do also how do we ensure that we organize our workforce, to leverage opportunities so that it won’t be an instance when new skills or technologies are being introduced, our people do not have have the competence to sustain or manage it because they are not skilled enough. So those are the things that we will need to consider in order to build up our labour force participation.

“Then funding on the part of the state , we will look at healthcare, education, even in terms of entrepreneurial development and I think that Oyo State has been doing a lot in that regard by providing significant portion of our budget towards educating our people and developing our healthcare delivery system.

“We know also that the State cannot do everything. How can we ensure that we also have funding to assist within the educational sector, among the healthcare institutions. OYSHIA is doing well and we are also reviewing the idea of the Oyo State Health Trustfund through which individuals and corporate organisations could possibly support our aspiration as a state by pooling resources for the healthcare benefit of our people. We will consider that as well.

“Then we look at OYSIPA, with a view to training and empowering our people so that we won’t have cases of people; as it was cited by the Executive Secretary of the Agency for Youth Development, whereby someone that was given a loan of N1m could not account for it at the end of the day. How do we ensure that we train and monitor the activities of some while noting and addressing the cases of those that cannot effectively manage business on their own.”

“They need to be trained and possibly given an opportunity, apprenticeship for them to develop the competence because running any business successfully requires a lot of courage, devotion and tenacity to be able to succeed.

“Some of our young people don’t have it , they want something that they will start and it will immediately begin to generate income, the moment that they face challenges, they just hands off. So we really want to help them, an agency like OYSIPA should be able to have a platform whereby we can have entrepreneurial development, optimised on a large scale which can attract or pull the private sector partners, that will train and give our youths the opportunity to work and earn a living, be funded also after they are certified as having the capacity and skill set before releasing them to drive their own entreprises.

“So these are critical areas. And we even look at it to the point of those our technicians, our mechanics, artisans, the bricklayers, the builders, they are part of our economy. How do we ensure also that we don’t have quacks. We have been seeing cases of building collapse. This occurs when builders have not been adequately trained either formally or informally yet they ply their trade and form part of our economy.

“They are still building houses till now. So how do we ensure that instead of just focusing on those who will be trained from our universities, technical schools, we also ensure that these people are being trained and they have some level of certification so that if I am giving my vehicle to a mechanic, I can be sure that the mechanic will not add to the problem of my vehicle. That they have the competence to fix it.

“We will also look at the issue of technical schools, in those days when you cannot continue with your maybe primary school education, maybe you are not so good or interested in formal learning, you won’t just have to drop out be moved into technical schools where you can get some skills and it is about what you can do with your hands practically. We can actually move some of our drop outs into technical schools instead of roaming the streets. We can move them from primary school to our technical school. So we need our technical schools to become fully operational.

“The one we have currently , some of them are not equipped, they can’t even deliver the objective of training people in skill acquisition, we need to see what we can do about it. All these things are what we as technical working group will be looking into to ensure that we have the holistic approach towards addressing the issue of healthcare and nutrition, addressing the issue of education and addressing the issue of labour force participation. How do we reduce unemployment among our young people . How do we ensure that young people are living productively. Our women and our men, our young boys and our young girls.

“So these are the things we considered at our last meeting and hopefully we should. Our Human Capital Development Consultant for the Southwest will take us further on what we need to do in coming up with our work plan. The Work plan that is going to consist of our objectives, our target and also the necessary interventions thay we need, timelines to deliver our human capital development agenda. So thank you very much, we will be looking at the minute , highlight of the meeting before we move on to our human capital development agenda.