NAN-ELS-3
Course
By Emmanuel Okara
Lagos, March 29, 2017 (NAN) Mrs Simisola Nwogugu, the Executive Director, Junior Achievement Nigeria (JAN), says ideally, she will like the education authorities to make entrepreneurial studies an elective course in the nation’s institutions of learning.
Nwogugu made the suggestion in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday in Lagos.
She said that by so doing, even students who are not offering core science courses could benefit from the programme that would make them better managers of their resources.
“So, if you are not a science student you are in commerce or an accounting student you can also add entrepreneurial studies to that,’’ she said.
The director spoke ahead of the Global Money Week 2017 in which the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and JAN would partner to impart financial literacy curriculum to no fewer than 80, 000 students in the nation.
“The goal of Global Money Week is to teach children and youths about money, saving, creating livelihoods, gaining employment and becoming an entrepreneur through interactive and fun activities.
“This aligns with the three pillars upon which Junior Achievement’s programmes are built: Financial Literacy, Work Readiness, and Entrepreneurship’’.
The programme will begin simultaneously on March 30, and will have no fewer than 800 schools in 36 states of the federation taught the rudiments of financial literacy.
She told the NAN that the body had been working relentlessly with volunteers and donors to achieve its objective of making Nigerian students to be money-wise.
“As a non-profit body since inception in 1999, we have been able to reach 670, 000 students across Nigeria.
“And the way we’ve done that is really by engaging with our board members, there are about eleven companies that support us; they are the ones that pay our rents and our salaries.
“So we can get funding for programmes from different companies, partners and any individual companies willing to support our programme,’’ Nwogugu said.
In terms of getting the job done even in areas where JAN did not have manpower on ground, she said that the organisation usually worked with likeminded NGOs to achieve its goals.
“We look for partners in cases where we do not have….., we train them on what need them to do and so we partner with these individual organisations.
“We are trying to expand to the North because we have so many humanitarian organisations there that intend to alleviate poverty and so, we bring our own service into place.
“We are expanding to the North-East, we now have twenty three partners, we are working with the different NGOS that are already there working with the IDPs,’’ she said.
Looking back on the grounds the organisation had covered since 1999, Nwogugu told NAN that the spirit of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been deeply entrenched in the society.
“At the earlier stages, nobody wanted to leave their job to do volunteer work in the name of CSR for fear of being sacked.
“But today, the story is different, corporate organisations, notable individuals etc are literarily falling over themselves to be part of our programme,’’ Nwogugu added.
NAN reports that JAN is part of Junior Achievement Worldwide (JAWW), the world’s largest and fastest-growing non-profit economic education organisation with a 121-country network.
As part of a global network, JAN is able to leverage resources and expertise to deliver localised cutting-edge experiential programmes.
The programmes are built on JAWW’s three pillars of Work Readiness, Entrepreneurship and Financial Literacy to in- and out-of-school youth ages 5 to 27 free of charge. (NAN)
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(Editing by Peter Ejiofor)