The Minister of Youth, Jamila Bio-Ibrahim, has stated Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea are finalising an agreement aimed at promoting youth development and collaboration between the two countries.
Speaking to journalists in Malabo, Bio-Ibrahim stated that the treaty, to be finalised later this year, will focus on areas such as peer learning, skills development, and transfer.
The agreement will also explore the possibility of Equatorial Guinea adopting Nigeria’s National Youth Service (NYSC) initiative.
The Minister highlighted that the treaty will provide opportunities for Nigerian youth to produce commodities for Equatorial Guinea, leveraging the country’s larger population.
The agreement will also support collaboration in sectors such as furniture production, agro-forestry, fashion, and garment, as well as other cash crops.
“Well, the purpose of this trip, of coming with Mr. President on this trip to Equatorial Guinea was to explore areas of youth development with our Equatorial Guinean counterparts and we’re in the process of arriving at an agreement on youth development with my counterpart, which we will be finalizing by the Joint Commission, which comes up later this year.
“From Mr. President speech at several of our engagements, several bilateral engagements, he has clearly stated his commitment to collaborating with other African leaders to ensure that we harness the youth demography, the bulge of young people in Africa, towards transformational economic development of the continent and that it’s only when we’re strong as a continent and all the leaders come together that we can harness the potential of our young people across the continent,” she said.
Bio-Ibrahim emphasised President Tinubu’s commitment to collaborating with African leaders to harness the continent’s youth demographic for transformational economic development.
“Well, I cannot say, 100% right now, because it is not finalized. So it will be, I will just give you a few of the points that we’ve been mutually agreed upon and well areas of like the National Youth Service called the NYSC, they’re considering collaboration, seeing how we can actually engage in peer learning, to see that for a possibility of actually adopting that initiative and areas of skills development and transfer as well.
“We want to see, even though Equatorial Guinea is not a country as populous as Nigeria, we want to also see how we can support collaborate by producing, channeling some of our youth population to be producing commodities for equatorial Guinea across various sectors and then you are aware that through the presidential initiative on youth enterprise clusters.
“We’re working to ensure that we develop our furniture value chain through agro-forestry, and, of course, the fashion and garment sector as well, and other cash crop sectors as well. And this is a very viable economy for that kind of collaboration,” she said.
