Doyin Diya Odusanya, Special Assistant to the Honourable Minister of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy, Federal Republic of Nigeria put light on the candle of over 500 Youths that came from far and near to benefit from the life changing training and empowerment program tagged “Ignite The Fire”. This training came up during the 2025 Youths Convention which was healed at C&S Morning Star Church.
In his interview with The Eye News on the training and empowerment program he said “This is our own little ways of giving back to the society who has also impacted us and contributed to making us who we are and in our own little spaces and corners we desided to give back to our society., holiday is a period when a lot of secondary school students are not going to school”.
“A lot of them especially the senior secondary school students like the SS2 and SS3 will soon be moving to higher institution” . “So instead of wasting their time at home or perhaps going into activity that may not be helpful to them, we came up with this idea of training” . ” This training will capture their mind expose them to different skills that is different to what they are learning in school and some of them registered online to participate in this training ” . ” In total we have over 500 participants, the training program is also is part of our 2025 Lagos Youth Convention of our church, the Morning Star church”.
“So, we thought that in this year’s convention, it’s really important for us to think of something tangible and meaningful we can do to assist the young ones—I mean, the youth.”
“This training is not just for members of the church alone; people from other churches are here. We have non-Christians here, that is, Muslims, and people came from all walks of life to do this training, and this training is absolutely free.”
In this training, we have Adire tie and dye making. The facilitator for the Adire tie and dye is Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library and Museum. They came all the way from Abeokuta and have been here since Friday. They are the ones training these people on how to make Adire. Behind me is part of what they’ve done, and they are showcasing it as an exhibition.
We have people training on electrical engineering, Tech Web Designs (IT-related), Beauty Cosmetics, Hairdressing, Shoemaking, Popcorn making, and Sewing.
” We are doing all these to open the minds of these young ones to lucrative activities and disengage their mind for activities that will really not help them and perhaps may lead them into crime”. Basically that’s just what we’re trying to do by assisting the government also from our own little corner.”.
” We all know that government is doing a lot to get a lot of youths out of the street by engaging them with jobs, we know that government jobs is not enough even in the advanced countries of this world like America, Asia and all of Europe.”. ” You see this when they complain about unemployment, It’s just that the rates might not be as high as that of Africa but the most important thing is that instead of just waiting for that white collar job or government job, why not think of something else you can do, at the end of the day little by little, you can begin to grow yourself and grow your business”.
“look at people like :Tony Elumelu, Mike Adenuga, Dangote, Abdul Samad etc”. ” All these people I mentioned are multi-billionaires, so if we open the mind of our youths to crafts, some of them might develop and might even discover what they’ve been thinking or imagining which has not come to reality and from here they will develop it”.
“Importantly I want to appreciate the Honorable Minister of Arts, Culture, Tourism, and the Creative Economy. Who, of course is doing a lot in tandem with the agenda of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu GCFR, who has said that there is need for partnership and collaboration in order to engage the youth. We’re targeting providing jobs for over 2 million Nigerians and we believe that this is the way to go about it by training then on things like this.
“As we are training them here, we’ve written to some banks to give them startup capital so that when they finish here they will have capital to start what they have learnt”. “Some of them will not even finish it here because some of the trainings is not what they can learn can finish in one day, so we are still going to pay for them if they are spending two months, three months or additional two weeks or one month as the case may be”. “We are going to pay for them to make sure that they fully acquire that skill”.
“We are not just here to demonstrate in front of the camera, we really want to pick them and develop them according to their capacity and the interest shown in them”. “We are working with some financial institutions to give us startup capital that will be giving to them directly” .
We have the plan of taking this program out of Lagos to other parts of the country”, “Today we have over 500 participants here, we have made provision for 1000 participants and we plan taking this training accross six states plus federal capital territory”. “Automatically alot of youths will benefit from it.
