By Daniel Dauda, Jos
In an attempt to reduce high rate of unemployment ravaging Nigeria and ensure self-sufficiency, a non governmental organization under the aegis of TEKAN Peace Desk have graduated about 19 trainees on various skills acquisition programmes.
The 19 graduands cutting across different religious beliefs were trained on catering, make-up artist, cosmetology, barbing salon and decoration.
Speaking at the epoch making graduation on Tuesday in Jos, Mrs Helen P. Haggai, Coordinator TEKAN Peace said what prompted them to keyed into the initiative is because Plateau State have brunt into crisis for the past 20 years, and there are a lot of talks and dialogue within those at the helm of affairs either as religious leaders or political leaders.
But what we again see is that people speaks with their two sides of the mouth. You know people will just see things and just go back.
And we felt that, you can have two approaches it be top-bottom, bottom-top and we said since we are the people at the grassroot, and were those who bear the brunt of all this crisis especially the woman and the youths, we felt that instead of us coming to talk, talk and talk and nothing comes out of it why can't we do our interfaith differently.
"So we brought this approach, bringing the indigenes together, the women and then young people, bringing them from the two divide(Christians and Muslims) together we build their trust on each other and because they are poor we gave them the means of livelihood.
"So all the last six years we pick from different places and bringing them together and as you can see from what happened here they have built synergy and friendship and yet again they have something to put in the table for their children for those women who are widows and youth who have nothing doing", she mentioned.
She also revealed that in no distanced time TEKAN Peace will meet with Plateau State Microfinance Development Agency,PLASMIDA and Plateau Peace Building Agency,PPBA, to strategize for better partnership so that their impact may well be feel more than the present.
"We have challenges in terms of finance, you see we could have done more than 19 people but if we have more funds we will go more bigger. We will get more young people to take them out of the street and empowered them to be self reliant."
She charged the graduands to take advantage of the skills acquired and be the employers of labour as they were been given start up packs.
"We have monitoring and evaluation team as mechanisms for checkmating the beneficiaries from time to time", TEKAN Coordinator noted.
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