The Kwara State Coordinator, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria, Mrs. Zainab Abdulmalik, and the Coordinator, Millennium Development Initiative, Mr. Emmanuel Azubuike, have said that lack of requisite skills by graduates of tertiary institutions in the country is aggravating graduate unemployment.

They advised the graduates to avail themselves of skills development platforms of the government and other concerned stakeholders and agencies to acquire skills, upgrade and develop themselves for wealth and employment creation and self reliance.

They spoke in Ilorin on Tuesday during the graduation of Kwara State Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development in agro-allied (farming) group for the Batch 'B' 2012-2013 members of the National Youth Service Corps.

Abdulmalik said the programme was in collaboration with the state's NYSC  and was aimed at training some of the corps members in relevant skills, particularly on the agro-allied sub-sector.

She stated that SMEDAN was of the opinion that many graduates were not employable because of lack of skills. She added that the agency was inculcating in the graduates  the essence of self reliance instead of searching for elusive white collar jobs.

She also identified SME development and skill acquisition as mechanisms to reduce high rate of unemployment and stimulate economic development and wealth creation windows in the country. She added that SMEs were contributing substantially to Gross Domestic Product in the country. She also appealed to the government to provide more soft loans for graduates to start business.

"We are carrying out the training for them so that they can have something to fall on. Aside agricultural skills, we also taught them simple business plan, marketing skills and managerial entrepreneurship.  We also brought experts in writing business and feasibility studies.

"What many of them have is paper qualification which does not enable them to do much. As such, we believe that they must have a skill, which they would be able to fall back on.  So they do not need to start waiting for white collar jobs at the end of the day.

"Skill acquisition is a great strategy to reduce unemployment in Nigeria.  Statistics has it that about 90 per cent of SMEs contribute so much to the GDP.  A lot of them are micro because they have less than 10 employees and a capital base of  less than N5m. Basically they are micro but they contribute so much to the economy," Abdulmalik said.