The federal government has reaffirmed its commitment to tackling unemployment across the country through the implementation of the National Industrial Skills Development Programme.

The Minister of Trade and Investment, Mr. Olusegun Aganga, said this during the inauaguration of the Industrial Training Funds' Headquarters Annex and ICT Training Centre, in Jos on Friday.

According to Aganga, the NISDP is a skills acquisition programme designed to attract resource empowerment for its trainees upon graduation and it was in line with the Industrial Revolution Plan of the Ministry of Trade and Investment.

He said, "We are already on the path to addressing the problem of skills gap and unemployment through the introduction and implementation of the National Industrial Skills Development Programme. The idea is that we want to turn our quantity advantage as a nation into a productive advantage. And the only way to do it is through skills acquisition and education after which we can provide opportunities for those that have acquired the skills to set up their own businesses or to be gainfully employed.

"Therefore, the strategy of the Ministry of Trade and Investment, working together with the ITF, is to first of all identify the critical sectors of the economy where we have comparative and competitive advantage. The second thing is to link those sectors or industries that we have identified to innovation, Research and Development. Then, the third thing is to link those sectors to industrial skills development. That is where the NISDP comes in."

The minister said that his ministry, in collaboration with the ITF, had put structures in place to ensure that trainees from the NISDP were empowered to be either gainfully employed or able to set up their own businesses.

He said, "We have already put a robust structure in place to enable those who have been trained to be gainfully employed. it is useless just teaching people how to do things without training them to work. By training to work, we mean providing them the opportunities, either to be gainfully employed or to set up their own businesses and form cooperatives."