On Wednesday, the President said that 500 prisoners in every prison across the country are now receiving training.
During a press conference on Wednesday in Abuja, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Technical, Vocational, and Entrepreneurial Education Abiola Arogundade stated that the training is a component of the current administration’s plan to reduce the 133 million people estimated to be living in poverty in Nigeria.
Beyond incarceration, she claimed, the program provides opportunity for offenders to grow personally and professionally, including vocational training. She claimed that by preparing inmates for life after release from prison, this method invests in their future and the well-being of society.
According to Arogundade, this viewpoint acknowledges each person’s humanity and capacity for growth, and the initial evaluation highlights how urgent the intervention must be.
The counselor to the president emphasized that among other things, the prisoners will receive training in fashion design, information technology, soap production, fashion, poultry, and fishing.
According to her, at this time, the emphasis will be on prisoners whose sentences are about to expire.
“We’ve also started training in the correctional centers,” she stated. We introduced the plan in Kuje. A few people from my office went to the correctional facility to audit the needs of the prisoners. I’m pleased to report that we have begun the process of auditing and evaluating the trainees.
We are pleased to declare that it has been obtained for every trainee. We provide N500,000 to you to start your business when your prison sentence and training is over, preventing you from entering a correctional facility as a repeat offender. This plan is still in action.
We are thus relocating to Suleja from Kuje Correctional Center. We plan to attempt to replicate this intervention in each of the nation’s correctional facilities.
Arogundade gave the following explanation when asked how many prisoners they hope to train by the end of the year: “I will put it in each correctional center; we would like to train a minimum of 500 inmates.”
There are currently 723 of them in Kuje, but we would like to train at least 500 of them. This is because training is something you choose to do, not something the military would do.
According to Arogundade, there are two aspects to the training, and the duration varies between six and nine months, contingent upon the goals of the prisoners.
We are also training the beneficiaries, she said. For instance, we train you on how to have the best hairdressing abilities if you want to become a hairdresser. We give you power through the kiosk.
In addition, there will be three revenue sources for the kiosk. As previously indicated, you can utilize the kiosk for your primary skill, which in this case is hairdressing. It can also be used for point-of-sale businesses and other endeavors.
Thus, we are working along with the bank. In addition to providing the POS, they can also charge your phone using it. We are utilizing that as a multi-purpose intervention for three revenue streams that we are introducing today, and we will distribute it to the recipients following their certification and training,” the spokesperson stated.