Owing to abnormally high rates of unemployment, African youths and graduates of tertiary institutions are finding increasingly difficult to secure well-paying fulltime jobs.

In Nigeria, for example, the unemployment rate for youths (15-34 years) doubled from 19 percent in 2016 to 37 percent in 2019, while the rate for graduates of tertiary institutions rose from 23 percent to 41 percent during the same period.

The problem of youth unemployment will surely worsen in the future as the expected slow growth of the economy will generate fewer job to engage the projected surge in the youth population.

To earn a reasonable return on their investments in tertiary education, African youths in the future will have to choose to either emigrate to a high-income country in the face restrictive entry requirements and rising anti-immigration sentiments or stay home and become an entrepreneur in an often difficult and unstable business environment.

Regrettably, most tertiary institutions in Africa teach their students the academic courses required for paid employment rather than training courses on entrepreneurship and business management.

LADI Academy will seek to bridge this gap by providing practical courses on how to start and manage micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs).

It will also serve as a platform for the provision of business development services (BDS) aimed at de-risking the MSME sector and addressing the key constraints on MSME development.