Pastor Glory Abrefera, President/CEO Mustard Seed Group has called on the Federal Government to set up regulatory framework for multilevel marketing to thrive in Nigeria.

He said the sector generated over N800 billion annually, stating that in a country like Nigeria with mass unemployment the sector could provide jobs and gainful employment to millions of Nigerians.

Speaking with journalists in Lagos in an interactive session to introduce Global Housing Solution which is based on multilevel marketing, he said the history of multilevel marketing in the world and how it has helped so many world wide in the last 64 years and 10 years of so in Nigeria was well-known.

According to him, "the benefits are enormous. Multilevel marketing, if given the required government support through policy pronouncement, can employ more than 1,000,000 people in just two years especially in the troubled Niger Delta."

This, he said when carried out will take several youths off the streets and reduce militancy in the region.He said multilevel marketing fosters co-existence among even the worst enemies and also help in educating people.

According to him, "statistics has shown that more than 80 per cent of millionaires in the USA made their wealth through the multilevel marketing concept.

You need no initial capital for take off, as long as you can communicate. Multilevel marketing business, if encouraged in Nigeria, can also help to strengthen our fledgling democracy because of the way it works. It's about us and not about me. Researchers are saying that by the year 2010, 505 of Nigerian millionaires would make their wealth through this great business concepts called multilevel marketing.

"This gathering has become necessary due to the fact that the Global Housing is coming from a region where the expected news item for the past 15 years has been hostage taking, bursting of petroleum pipelines, oil related clashes.

"In view of this, we have decided to partnership with the core media in Nigeria which those of you in Lagos Nigeria represents," he said.

Giving background to his chain of companies, he said:

"The Mustard Seed Group, the journey so far, we started as a co-operative through my dream in 2005 December 10, 2005, five days after, the CBN launched the Micro Finance Policy framework and driven by the passion to help the poor. "We started to grow the co-operative which we later find out to be too small and slow, it's also a kind of selfish micro-finance organisation which does not recognise none members and going by the high poverty level in the war-torn Warri at the time. It was very obvious that several active poor women and youths from the region may not have the means to pay their mandatory 30 per cent equity contribution before they can borrow.

"For this reason, we decided to float a micro finance institution that has a broader scope which we used to secure loans from the bank in order to have enough to give out to those who don't have the wherewithal to save. We mortgaged our own properties together with loved ones which served as third party mortgage with the bank, we started growing from here.

"But we discovered that the spill over effect of the oil related crises has not abated. We at this time began to hold seminars, workshops, lectures, among the womenfolk who are our main target at that time, capacity building was key to our success.

So we decided to run a 15 minutes daily documentary on the local DRTV Station to address the issue of oil dependency. We highlighted several comparative economies in Nigeria that has done very well without the direct presence of oil. I used Aba, Lagos, Onitsha, Owerri, Kano, and Jos etc as case study.

"After the success of our micro credit activity, we decided to see how we can also make some impact in the area of job creation as part of our own little effort in pluging into the needs agenda of the federal Government. In achieving this noble goal, we decided to start going into direct investments in order for us to be able to directly employ our young graduate youths who mostly roam the streets in search of oil jobs which in most cases are not there.

"As i speak to you today, this singular initiative has been able to generate more than 500 jobs but with the launching of our flagship scheme, the global Housing Solutions Ltd, it is now possible to further engage more workforce that can cut across all professions, architects, builders, painters, labourers and other support staff.

"Currently, we have about 14 subsidiaries that made up the group.

"Our Co-operative has grown to become a pacesetter and one of the biggest in Delta State.In fact, we have received calls from Lagos for the extension of our co-operative activity. Our little worry is the restrictions that you cannot extend beyond your primary area of registration. This concern was also expressed by the BRAC boss from Bangladesh, who came to Nigeria recently. I believe that microfinance activity can grow the economy and serve as a boost to our national gross domestic product.

"It will also afford Nigerians to look the oil revenue/economy which I refer to as an enclave/poverty economy. We also have a building materials outfit called vision Global Building Concept Ltd, we sell building materials of all types.

Top Choice Chemicals and Procurement Ltd, Waste management and Pest Control outfit. We also have a monumental communications and technology Ltd involved in car tracking and sales of communication gadgets. We also have great Afro Asian Alliances Ltd.

We use for the the Asians Import and export business, right now we have an order to supply 100000 tons of iron ore to china. We also have Mustard Seed Micro Investment Ltd which we use to compliment the Co-operative in our micro credit scheme."We are now promoting Global Housing Solutions Ltd one of our multilevel marketing outfits established to provide housing to the middle class and below."