CBN to Grant Corps Members Loans to Be Repaid Within 7 Years

NYSC File Image

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has announced that it’ll offer loans to National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members so that they can set up businesses to help curb the problem of unemployment in the country.

Punch reports that Godwin Emefiele, the CBN governor, made this known when he received Brig.-Gen. Shuaibu Ibrahim, the NYSC Director-General in Abuja.

Emefiele said interested applicants will have to attend the CBN’s entrepreneurship training centres “to acquire skills in various vocational areas for economic survival at the end of their national service instead of waiting for white-collar jobs.”

A statement by the NYSC on Thursday said that Emefiele added that upon completion of the training, the loans would be given to the participants to help them start their businesses.

The statement said:

The Central Bank of Nigeria has expressed willingness to provide further opportunities of self-employment for corps members through its skill acquisition training. The CBN governor explained that upon completion of training, beneficiaries would get the cumulative value which represents a loan that would be repaid within seven years with a two-year moratorium.

He recalled that an earlier programme, the Youth Entrepreneurship Development Programme was launched by the bank in 2016 and served as a springboard for the empowerment of corps members and other youths for self-employment and wealth creation.

Emefiele assured the NYSC DG that the CBN National Microfinance Bank would also support interested corps members in business financing. He advocated the patronage of the Nigerian textile industry, which he described, as the largest employer of labour in the country in the 1990s.