Take advantage of new self-employment opportunities, experts tell young people

A consortium of Nigerian new media experts on Saturday in Abuja urged young people to take advantage of the new frontiers of the creator economy to bring value globally and create jobs for themselves.

They also called on President Bola Tinubu to strengthen the country's creative economy as a strategic solution to reduce rising unemployment in Nigeria.

Saturday's call came during a Digital Connect conference hosted by Young People Connect Africa to discuss ways to boost digital entrepreneurship and innovation to tackle the unemployment crisis.

In its list of youth unemployment of 20 countries published last April, The Spectator Index, a global indicator of youth unemployment, placed Nigeria's unemployment rate at 53%, the second highest number of unemployed youth in the world after 61% in South Africa.

"We've focused primarily on the individual and what the individual citizen can do for themselves, and that's taking new media as a priority," said John Obidi, a Lagos-based new media consultant and founder of business community HeadStart Africa, on Saturday.

Speaking on the theme of “Hacking the Creator Economy”, Obidi argued that by being creative and industrious, Nigerians can export more than music and art to the rest of the world when they take advantage of the changing creator economy.

He said, "There was a time when everything good in technology was supposed to come from India. And it was a necessity due to the realities of their time. Now we are also facing those realities.

“Nigeria has so much creative talent. Nigeria is Africa when it comes to creativity and music. Africa looks up to Nigeria.

"Beyond entertainment, more and more young people can be awakened to the opportunities of the new media space. The fact that you are from Nigeria does not mean that your market is necessarily Nigeria. And that is why the global economy is such a beautiful thing: you can be here in Nigeria and exchange value with someone in Asia and derive value from it."

For Julius Afolabi, CEO of the Calabar-based School of Business and Career Excellence, the Tinubu administration must invest in digital infrastructure to create a prototype environment that stems the brain drain.

“Nigerians have the raw knowledge all over the world. Nigerians are a creative and intelligent set of people. However, poor infrastructure has been the challenge. Now how do we combat this?

Meanwhile, content creator and social media influencer Salem King said Nigeria's internet penetration rate of 40.72% leaves so many stories untold.

He felt that the global acceptability that Nigerian music enjoys today can be amplified through government investment in the creator economy.

“Social media is one of the best strategies for growing, creating value and building healthy communities.

"There's a certain demand for our culture that we've seen in how the world accepts our music and movies. And I think the next area where we'll start to see that growth is in content.

So when government policies allow access to more digital and creative resources, more stories will come out of Nigeria. And we may even increase international demand for our culture,” King said.

For his part, conference organizer and senior strategist at YPCA, Joseph Etim, lamented that positive Nigerian stories are not told enough. He said the negative perception of the country in various parts of the world can be corrected through proper use of social media.

Etim noted, “Young Nigerians need to come to terms with the fact that their stories invent the world's perception of them.

"The more good stories we tell, the more we can correct those perceptions. Young people need to focus more on telling the good stories, because the world will always tell their own story. Now it's up to us to tell ours."

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