1Youth2Skills: Soludo’s Bold Experiment Builds a Generation of Entrepreneurs

By Chuka Nnabuife (ANCISRO)

Anambra State is quietly scripting a new chapter in youth empowerment, and the rest of Nigeria is beginning to take notice. At the heart of that change sits the One Youth, Two Skills Solution (1Y2SS) — Governor Chukwuma Charles Soludo’s flagship enterprise program that blends cultural practice with modern training to tackle one of the nation’s most stubborn problems: youth unemployment. Launched in October 2022, 1Y2SS was conceived not as a short-term palliative but as a structured pathway to build an entrepreneurial culture; three years on, its results are hard to ignore.

More than 13,000 young Anambra citizens and residents of male and female genders have been trained under the program, which deliberately reaches out to graduates, non-graduates and persons with disabilities alike. The training is intensive and practical. Under certified master trainers — including the respected shop owners, Ndi Oga or master craftsmen — participants learn trades ranging from commercial agriculture, fishery and food processing to carpentry, metal fabrication, confectionery production and services, catering services, fashion design, photography, filmmaking, ICT and digital entrepreneurship.

The Business School of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, and the national labour ministry provide entrepreneurship instruction and certification, while the Solution Innovation District (SID) sharpens digital skills for thousands more.

What distinguishes 1Y2SS from many earlier efforts is the way it marries the Igbo indigenous apprenticeship with formal support. The programme’s five pillars — apprenticeship, training, cooperative formation, financing and mentorship — fuse the Igbo tradition of igba boyi with government backing. Graduates pass out not only with practical competence but with seed funding from the state government, business guidance and encouragement to form cooperatives, thereby improving their bargaining power and access to larger institutional opportunities. In its first year alone, over 5,000 beneficiaries were awarded ₦2 billion in start-up funds, and some 20,000 young people benefited from digital training through the SID. The second cohort, backed by ₦3.5 billion, will see 8,300 entrepreneurs graduate at the International Convention Centre, Awka, on 23 September 2025 — an event expected to attract ministerial representation from the federal government, reflecting the project’s national resonance.

Community involvement is central to the scheme’s edge. Traditional rulers, community leaders, clergymen and women are not peripheral supporters but active participants: they supervise training, endorse apprenticeships, and in many cases serve as master trainers themselves. That locals’ oversight — the presence of Ndi Oga who still command respect and practical knowledge in their trades — ensures that training is rooted in lived experience, and that accountability is community-anchored rather than top-down. It is this blend of tradition and institutional rigour that several observers describe as 1Y2SS’s masterstroke.

The model finds echoes abroad but retains its own unique identity which gives it edge. Germany’s dual vocational system, Kenya’s Ajira Digital Programme, South Africa’s Youth Employment Service and Singapore’s SkillsFuture all demonstrate how targeted skills investment can yield durable economic gains. India’s Skill India Mission, likewise, illustrates the scale and ambition possible when government, industry and training institutions align. But Anambra’s approach is singular in how it retools the centuries-old Igbo apprenticeship culture into a state-sponsored, modern enterprise pipeline — one that privileges both craft mastery and business acumen.

Its human stories are already emerging. Graduates who once struggled to find dignified work now run workshops, digital studios and farms; some have grown into employers themselves, taking on apprentices and, by extension, re-creating the cycle of skills transfer. HRM Igwe Chukwuemeka Ilounoegbunam, the physician-farmer and traditional ruler of Ifitedunu, Dunukofia, a master trainer, calls the initiative “a clear and effective solution to youth restiveness, unemployment and the need for an entrepreneurial revolution amid current economic challenges.”

For Governor Soludo, the calculus is simple: youth empowerment is an investment, not a favour. In placing tradition at the centre of a modern skills architecture, Anambra has offered a proof-of-concept that development can be both locally anchored and outward looking. As other states look to replicate the template and federal attention grows ahead the 23 September graduation, 1Y2SS stands as a reminder that when community wisdom and institutional will converge, young people cease to be a demographic problem and become, instead, the architects of a different future.

• Nnabuife, Managing Director, Anambra State Civic and Social Reformation Office (ANCISRO), writes from Awka.