Nigeria intends launching National Youth Bank next year to fund young people's business plans

NIGERIA'S federal government has announced plans to establish National Youth Bank (NYB) with an initial capital sum of N75bn ($175m) as part of an empowerment programme aimed at helping young people to realise their dreams.

Launched as part of a plan to fund youth initiatives and enable young people get funding for their business idea, the NYB is expected to be up and running in 2023. Sunday Dare, Nigeria's minister of youths and sports development, revealed that the instruments for the establishment of the bank will be presented to the Federal Executive Council early next year for approval.

Mr Dare, who revealed that his ministry has empowered 31,000 youths under the Nigeria Youth Development Funds, said that so far, the ministry has only received N10bn out of the N25bn allocated to it for the year 2022. Nigeria's federal government had created the Nigeria Youth Investment Fund as part of efforts to empower youths in the area of entrepreneurship.

This N75bn NYB fund was approved by the Federal Executive Council to support entrepreneurship for the over 68m Nigerian youths between the ages of 18 and 35. According to Mr Dare, 61,000 youth applied for cyber security program currently run by his ministry, and the youth bank is the future as it will disburse loans on single digit interest rates.

Mr Dare said: “I have discussed the plans with Mr President and he had given us his commitment to support the creation of such bank that will solely cater for our youths in the area of entrepreneurship. The African Development Bank has concluded plans to partner with our ministry and once the banks come on stream, they are ready to roll out the necessary support.

“You can imagine what it will mean for the youths to have their own bank that will be giving out loans on a single digit interests. We have so far empowered 31,000 youths out of the 45,000 approved, to receive between N250,000 from the N10bn youth development funds.”

According to the minister, over 4m youths had applied for the loans out of which 45,000 were shortlisted. He added that what they have done is to ensure that only those who are qualified, with the relevant business plans are shortlisted and eventually empowered.