Economic and Financial Review

One of the major strands of the millennium development goals (MDGs) for global eradication of poverty is employment generation, which is also in tandem with one of the issues in Nigeria’s current economic development programme, the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy, otherwise known as NEEDS. As part of the programme’s title indicates, economic empowerment is a major focus of NEEDS, and apart from education, the second most important form of empowerment that a state could bestow on its citizens is to guarantee gainful employment. The issue of employment generation in the context of current efforts at alleviating poverty, internationally and domestically, cannot, therefore, be overemphasized But it is not enough to identify employment generation as a policy thrust to empower the people, and in the process tackle poverty headlong, it is equally important to address the how and where of employment and how much of it needs to be adequately generated to satisfy the yearnings of the unemployed masses. This is where the private sector, as the prime mover of the global economy becomes more relevant than the public sector, and why the informal sub-sector, in the context of developing countries, comes to the forefront in the whole arrangement.