Young Nigerians have been urged to engage in constructive engagement that would enable them to plan strategically for economic survival in the country.
The call was made by the Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Content Development Monitoring Board (NCDMB), Engr. Simbi Wabote, on Friday during a one day summit for 2021 Niger Delta Micro Small and Medium Enterprises with the theme ‘Stimulating MSME’s Growth Beyond Oil’ in Port Harcourt.
Speaking on the theme of the summit, Engr. Wabote described it as apt in view of the fact that energy transmission has become an immediate reality, and must ensure that the Niger Delta region is not left behind from the shift away from the fossil fuel and renewable energy.
The NCDMB boss who stressed that the whole world was walking away from crude oil and urged Nigerian to embrace change in energy and other discovered resources to grow the economy.
He also urged young Nigerians to prepare themselves to be competitive in the emerging world economic order beyond oil-and-gas.
One of the Keynote Speaker, Mrs Natasha Akoti who spoke on “The Healthy Diversification of the Niger Delta Economy away from its Reliance on Oil” said that Niger Delta region with over 30 million people has sustainable percentage of poverty which needs to be curbed.
Mrs Akoti who doubles as Chief Executive Officer of Legend Art Group said that Niger Delta as one of the region that supplies revenue to the entire nation is in a deplorable condition, and should be robustly supported especially the SME’s to scale in the respective enterprises.
“It’s quite fortunate that the Federal Government has put in a lot of mechanisms to mitigate the challenges such as access to finance, access to markets and also providing a safe haven for SME’s to be monitored,” she said.
She therefore called on stakeholders involved in sharing healthy framework in supporting the enterprise to come together and provide solutions to all the financing, electricity, market strategies that the SME’S need.
The CEO of Legend Art Group also called on government, all stakeholders, banking sector and all well to do private sectors to come together provide funds to help build the capacity of SME’S in Nigeria to curb unemployment and insecurity in the country.
Also present at the event was a CEO and Social Entrepreneur, Mr Suleman Yusuf who called on the governments of Niger Delta states to give entrepreneurs easy access to doing business and support young entrepreneurs with adequate funds.
