The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) , Prof. Tunji Olaopa, on Tuesday urged stakeholders including government and researchers to appropriately appreciate the role of youth work in national development.

Olaopa made the appeal in a keynote address he delivered at the Federal Ministry of Youth Development/University of Abuja Collaborative Workshop at the University of Abuja Main Campus.

He noted that relevant stakeholders in youth work education have an immediate task of fostering a wholesome perception of the nature and capacity of the youth, especially as a category with its own intrinsic value and as a unique resource in national development.

According to him, the youth work discipline has the potential to “generate an intellectual rigour that confronts the misalignment of youth work into an a-developmental category that is removed from all significant relevance.
Youth work education provides a space for more expert and professional interventions that are rooted in basic research, policy intelligence, analysis and advocacy, and professional curation of what it means to intervene in the youth question. “

According to him, professionalization will inevitably serve as the basis for building communities of practice and service that set the standard of practice and code of conduct and ethics by which youth work and its quality are enhanced through a proper theory of change and transformation.

He said that it would also facilitate the emergence of youth work practitioners whose commitment and loyalty to the profession and to young people could build public confidence, and also serve as the foundation for genuine policy shift that cares for the youth.

“This speaks to the fact that youth work and its professionalization cannot be rendered in academic terms alone. It requires a stakeholder approach that brings together the government, researchers, non-governmental and non-state actors and agencies, community organizations, policymakers and the youth themselves.The Nigerian government, as part of its significant and timely commitment to the professionalization of youth work, also has to create allowance to accommodate the services, commitment and passion of non-professionals whose non-profit charitable and philanthropic efforts and scope of programme interventions have sustained youth work so far in Nigeria”, he said.

According to him, this is a real policy concern that has to be negotiated and aligned with the formal frameworks that the government regulates.
“This then also implies that in professionalizing youth work, the government must necessarily harness the entire workforce, formal and informal, involved in youth work and incentivize them to produce results. In other words, part of this long-term investment requires attending to, capacitating and regulating the relationship between the non-core professionals and the low-income but earnest volunteers who have been toiling in the field of youth work while the professionalization effort had been underway. It is the efforts of these workers that have been preparing the ground for the triumph of policy shift in youth work.
In this regard, there is a lot to learn from the teaching profession and healthcare service industry, that still necessarily make up for funding gaps by enlisting the support of auxiliary teachers and L
locums.”

According to Olaopa, as the government commences the drive to the professionalization of youth work in Nigeria, it must be noted that the amount of investment required would be enormous. This will translate to higher costs for parents, government and youth charitable organisations.

He noted in this regard that the ministry must channel creative energy on how cost as a factor in professionalization might be defining for the implementation of the policy in focus.

Olaopa appreciated the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the Federal Executive Council for the visionary policy that not only recognized the significance of the youth in national development but also the readiness to “push the harnessing of the youth bulge to press Nigeria’s developmental advantages in the twenty-first century. “

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