The Industrial Training Fund (ITF), henceforth, graduands of its SUPA Program will earn local and international certification from awarding bodies to certify them fit for both the local and international markets.
The Director General of ITF, Dr. Afiz Oluwatoyin Ogun, who revealed this at a media briefing in Abuja, also announced that fund has abolished the practice of handing out starter-packs to graduands of its skills training programes.
He said as ITF commences SUPA Phase II deployment and training process, it is seeking to increase the number of privately owned training centers from 880 to 1500.
This, he explained was to enable ITF achieve its target of graduating 100,000 artisans in this phase.
According to him, the 100,000 artisans will be drawn from the 29,000 that graduated from SUPA Foundation program (Phase I) last year and from the pool of over 700,000 registered artisans on its SUPA platform.
“As this population is scattered across every local government area in Nigeria, it is necessary to have at least 2 training centers per local government to guarantee ease of access by artisans.
“The training center accreditation process is a comprehensive process that involves the examination of corporate structure of Training Centers, evaluation of their physical infrastructure and set-up, appraisal of their training equipment and assessment of competence/qualifications of their instructors. Each Training Center is required to firstly register on the SUPA platform of the ITF.
“Upon completion of this accreditation process, the Fund will publish the list of successful training centers based on their categorizations in categories “A”, “B” and “C”. Thereafter, the Fund will begin the process of notifying artisans of their deployment to the various accredited training centers based on proximity to their disclosed residential address.
“That exercise will commence and end before April 30, 2025,” the Ogun stated.
The DG further disclosed that the Fund is going to make significant investments in improving the capacities of accredited training centers to meet the target of SUPA which is international certification. Over 3000 (Three Thousand) instructors from the 880 (Eight Hundred and Eighty) accredited training centers have undergone train-the-trainer courses.
The Fund is developing a wholistic system for equipment support for training centers and also seeking ways to ease access to finance.
To achieve the goal of turning out 2 million trained artisans annually, the Fund will need to collaborate with 10,000 privately own and well-established training centers.