Friday, May 20, 2011

Mentoring entrepreneurs to transform Niger Delta

Business Day
20 May 2011


Most graduates and youths in the Niger Delta region want jobs in the oil/gas sector, but it is obvious that the offers are few.  The truth is that Small and Medium Scale Enterprises have a huge reservoir or opportunities that can absorb the surplus manpower. But what seems to be lacking is the requisite awareness in entrepreneurship development.

It is this gap that Josephine Itonyo, chief executive of Quantum Projects Limited  has come to fill by creating a technique that transform the army of angry unemployed youths into viable entrepreneurs.

With the firm which she started about a decade ago, Itonyo who is a 1992 Banking and Finance graduate of the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Port Harcourt, has been mentoring youths of the Niger Delta, including ex-militants, into entrepreneurs and efficient managers of men and materials.

So far, Quantum Projects  has collaborated with such organisations as Shell Nigeria, Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Company, Family Re-Orientation Education and Empowerment (FREE), the Federal Government’s Amnesty Committee, in the effort to transform the lives of the youths of the region. The result, she says is that the lives of thousands of youths have been turned around by “imbibing in them the fibre of entrepreneurship and the spirit of enterprise steeped in managerial acumen.”

She insists that about 10,000 entrepreneurs have been trained by Quantum. adding that most of them  have become successful business executives.

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