Human Empowerment through Skills Acquisition:Issues, Impacts and Consequences - A Non-Parametric View

Abstract

One of the major Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which Nigeria is set to achieve in 2015 is the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger with the target of halving the proportion of people who earn less than a dollar a day through skills acquisition. The study was on non-parametric view on issues, impacts and consequences of human empowerment through skills acquisition in Nigeria.

The aim of this study was to assess the impact and input of various skills acquisition encouraged and engaged by Nigerians especially the youths. The specific objectives are: to identify skills most learned by Nigerians, identify the major contributions of human empowerment through skills acquisition and access if opinion on skills acquisition is gender and education dependent.

The study was cross-sectional in nature conducted in Yaba and Akoka areas using a 21-item questionnaire tagged “Human Empowerment through Skills acquisition Questionnaire’ (HETSAQ), designed by the researchers and administered for the purpose. The researchers obtained a very high response rate from the field. Descriptive statistics were presented in tables and charts while Friedman rank test was used to test the hypothesis that skills acquisition has no significant impact on the recipients and to rank the perceived impacts and the Chi square test used to ascertain the influence of education on the responses obtained from respondents.

Results showed that most respondents have learnt one skill or the other and would prefer to be empowered in areas like computer skills, hair dressing, tailoring and soap making, etc. It was discovered that skills acquisition have significant contribution to society through human empowerment and such opinions have no gender bias but differed significantly by educational attainment.

From the discoveries, we therefore conclude that skills acquisition contributes greatly in elimination of joblessness in Nigeria, development of positive attitude towards work, developing entrepreneurial ability, builds self-reliant young people, leads to technological advancement, reduce poverty and crime rate in the society and these were the verdict of both men and women included in the study.

Keywords: skills acquisition, entrepreneurial ability, Friedman test, human empowerment, joblessness.