Governor Aliyu Akwe Doma of Nasarawa State has launched a skills acquisition programme aimed at economic emancipation and empowerment of mainly the youth and women in the state.

Chief Press Secretary to the Governor, Mohammad Ohitoto, who disclosed the programme in a statement on Tuesday, said the state government had also started a sensitisation workshop for unskilled, semi-skilled, and unemployed youths and women in Lafia, the state capital.

Speaking at the Lafia City Hall, venue of the launch of the skills acquisition initiative, Doma said the main objective of the programme was to, among other things, create a business environment and an economic culture that would address the absence of entrepreneurial know-how among the people, promote self-reliance among the youth, and eliminate idleness with its attendant vices.

According to him, it is in pursuit of these objectives that his administration established the Bureau for Economic Empowerment to streamline activities designed for implementation under the programme.

While calling on parents, community leaders, traditional rulers, and development partners to support the initiative, the governor revealed that his administration had awarded contracts worth N934 million for the upgrading of facilities at the existing Vocational and Relevant Technology Centres in Lafia, Doma, Wamba, and Nasarawa towns.

Speaking further on the implementation of the programme, Doma said in order to ensure equitable participation across the state, 60 youths, who are mainly artisans, primary and secondary leavers, and the physically challenged, had been selected from each of the local governments areas and development areas in the state for the first phase of the workshop.

"I have directed that 30 per cent of the participants to these workshops should be women. This is to enable us meet the Millennium Development Goals target for women empowerment," the governor said.

He enjoined youths and women to embrace the programme so as to "realise their full potentials to be self-employed, self-reliant, and to be masters of their own destiny."

Doma said that admission into the full-fledged acquisition centres would commence in the first quarter of 2009 with a total of 1,500 trainees, who upon completion will be assisted with take-off grants by government and also encouraged to access loans from the state's Micro-Finance Bank.

In their goodwill messages, Federal Commissioner in the Federal Character Commission, Abuja, Alhaji Mohammed Ari Gwaska, Managing Director of Jos Business School, Mr. Ezekiel Gomos, and Nasarawa State coordinator GTZ, Mr. Karl Brownizt, pledged to support the economic empowerment programme in order to complement government's efforts to open windows of economic opportunities for self-employment and wealth creation.

Director General of the Bureau for Economic Empowerment, Mr. Labaran Magaji, assured of his readiness to deliver the mandate of the government in its economic improvement programmes.