ENHANCING YOUTH EMPLOYABILITY AND ENTRPRENUERSHIP WITHIN THE LOCAL LABOUR MARKET

In enhancing youth employability and entrepreneurship, the designing and funding of youth development programmes adopting a national approach is necessary but not a sufficient approach to poverty reduction. This is because there are discrepancies in the nature and rate of unemployment in various sectors, regions, communities, urban and rural areas in the country which cannot be tackled using a national approach. In other words, youth development programmes should concentrate, from formulation to implementation and feedback stage, on locality, nature of unemployment, basic natural resources available in a particular community; existing skills and businesses, which are usually practiced at subsistence level and other unique characteristics prevalent in such communities. Consequently, this study propose a new framework that focuses on the local labour market that can employed in enhancing youth employability in Nigeria. In line with this, this study adopted the Positive Youth Model and evaluated the Millennium Village Projects located in Pampaida and Ikaram-Ibaram. Kaduna and Ondo State respectively to assess the viability of such projects towards enhancing youth employability and entrepreneurship .On the basis of the findings, this study recommends the replication of the project in all the wards in the country putting into consideration the skills and resource endowment available.