Within eight years, the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF) has created 221,172 direct and indirect jobs to tackle the challenges of unemployment and unemployability.

Feyisayo Alayande, executive secretary of Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF) said this at Wednesday’s third annual Lagos State Employment Summit themed ‘Job Creation Uniting for Impact: Create, Collaborate, Change’.

“Our eight-year journey has yielded more than 83,000 small businesses supported since inception, leading to 221,172 direct and indirect jobs created and over 204,000 direct and indirect jobs saved, thus over 500,000 businesses impacted via the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) Loan and business support programmes,” she said.

She further stressed that in ensuring that Lagos responds proactively to the dynamic challenges of unemployment and unemployability, LSETF was established in 2016 to create employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for all Lagos residents.

“With our access to finance program, our loan facility across different categories of business sizes in the MSMEs has helped in supporting 15,597 unique businesses as of May 2024.

“Since the introduction of our Lagos Innovate initiative in 2018, we have issued 532 workspace vouchers, incubated 215 tech startups, disbursed three hub loans (fully repaid), and trained 1,643 tech talents,” Alayande said.

Babajide Sanwo-Olu, governor of Lagos State said the mandate of LSETF is to expect real outcomes in 10-15 years down the line.

“The only way we can do it is collaboration, to identify new partners and for the partners to see the reason with us,” he said.

Sanwo-Olu said the government is not leaving the problem of employment to the employment trust funds and they are trying to reach a different set of people.

Tayo Aduloju, CEO of Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) said the state can create a million jobs per year.

He, however, noted that “if we do not solve the problem of economic growth then you can’t solve the problem of jobs.”

The NESG boss said if the Nigerian economy does not grow with the number of people it has then the problem of jobs can not be solved.

“Job creation is for the young people and the government do not have the capacity to employ the number of young people we have now,” Ayodele Olawande, minister of state for youth development said.

He further stated that the collaborative agencies and government need to talk about what is really needed.

“We are not creating a solution that looks inward,” Odunayo Sanya, managing director of MTN Foundation said while citing that a lot of people are excluded from formal education.