By Olatunde Dodondawa
Dangote Refinery to empower host communities youths
As part of efforts aimed at making youths from its host communities employable, Dangote Petroleum Refinery & Petrochemicals Company yesterday flagged off a vocational training scheme that will inculcate necessary skills in the young men and women from the Ibeju-Lekki area of its operation to make them marketable.
Dangote Group Executive Director, Capital Projects, Mr Devakumar Edwin said the initiative is a demonstration of Dangote Refinery’s commitment towards capacity building and youth empowerment in the country.
The vocational skills, which was launched in collaboration with the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) and the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) was designed to cover plumbing, masonry, welding, iron bending, auto mechanics and electrical works.
Edwin stated that the scheme geared towards instant value addition to the lives of the youths and their communities will the equip young men with trade skills that would prepare them for better opportunities.
“At Dangote Industries Limited, our Corporate Social Responsibility projects are centred around the development and wellbeing of the people, especially our host communities. In Ibeju Lekki, we have executed several projects that are enhancing the lives of the people. We have provided boreholes for all the communities, classrooms for the local school, and we just awarded scholarships to 51 secondary school students.
“This programme is another level of our intervention as it is targeted at providing vocational skills to the teeming youth population in our host communities. The youths are veritable assets in any society and the quality of the youths determines the outlook of tomorrow’s society. Therefore, an investment in developing vocational skills among youths will yield the desired results,” he said.
The Manager, Projects Certification and Authorisation Division (PCAD), NCDMB, Engr. Frank Ibi, who represented the Executive Secretary, Engr. Simbi Wabote, commended Dangote Refinery on its achievement and underlined that Nigerian Content is geared to promote domiciliation of value-adding activities and utilization of Nigerian human and material resources.
He said the board’s mandate is to ensure that training resources and efforts are devoted to providing young Nigerians with specialised skills and certifications needed to get employment.
Engr. Ibi commended Dangote’s commitment to NDCMB Human Capacity Development Initiatives, which he believed would provide a platform for the youths to contribute to Nigeria’s economic development.
In his remarks, Oba Akiolu said the programme was unprecedented in that the company was yet to start operation but yet decided to empower the youths from the area to make them employable.
The Monarch then encouraged the youths to utilize the skills which they will acquire through the training programme. The monarch, who commended Dangote Refinery for its unwavering support to community development initiatives in Lagos State, emphasized the need for the youths to work hard and be close to God.
