Sewing Machines, Laptops And The War On Poverty

A sewing machine does not look like much. In Oje market in Ibadan or Wuse market in Abuja, you can pick up a decent one for less than what some of our big men spend on aso-ebi for a single owambe. But put that machine in the hands of a young man who knows how to use it, and you have a business. You have an income. You have a family that eats three times a day.

That, in a nutshell, is the thinking behind the presidency’s National Poverty Reduction with Growth Strategy (NPRGS). And I must confess that it is one of the few government programmes in recent times that has made me sit up and pay attention.

As I have said previously on this page, Nigeria has never suffered from a shortage of empowerment programmes. From the National Directorate of Employment in the 1980s to the many schemes that have come and gone since, we have seen it all. What we have suffered from is empowerment that empowers nobody. We all know the routine. A politician gathers 200 people in a town hall, hands out grinding machines and wheelbarrows, poses for the cameras and goes home. Nobody was trained. Nobody follows up. Six months later, the grinding machine has been sold to pay school fees, and the politician is planning the next photo opportunity.

The NPRGS is trying something different, and that is why it deserves a fair hearing. The programme, driven by Senior Special Assistant to President Bola Tinubu on Technical, Vocational and Entrepreneurship Education (TVEE), Dr Abiola Arogundade, combines training, certification, equipment, and entrepreneurship support into a single package. You learn the trade. You get certified. You go home with the tools to practise it. That sequence is everything, and it is the sequence our previous programmes kept getting wrong.

The ambition is not small. According to the State House, the NPRGS feeds into the administration’s target of lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty within 10 years. The skills component alone is meant to reach five million young Nigerians, and a September 2026 report put the timeframe for that at four years. The Minister of Budget and Economic Planning, Senator Abubakar Atiku Bagudu, described the strategy as a cornerstone of the national development agenda, saying that by focusing on skills, the government is tackling poverty at the root.

He is right about the root. Poverty in this country is not only the absence of money. It is the absence of the means to make money. Give a young man N50,000, and it is gone in two weeks. Teach him solar installation and hand him the tools, and with the way our national grid has been behaving, he will never lack customers. That is the kind of arithmetic that makes sense to me.

And the hunger for skills is there. The Federal Ministry of Education’s separate Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) initiative received more than 1.3 million applications, matched 160,000 youths to training and enrolled over 73,000 across more than 1,700 accredited centres. One point three million applications. Anyone who still believes our young people are lazy should go and look at that figure again.

What I like about the NPRGS training menu is that it is grounded in the real economy. Digital technology, cybersecurity, web development, fashion design, makeup artistry, solar installation and agriculture-related enterprises. Mind you, these are not certificates for the wall. These are trades with paying customers waiting at the other end.

The programme is also moving. In Abuja, more than 300 beneficiaries trained in cybersecurity, web development and solar installation went home with laptops and certificates. In Ibadan, 700 beneficiaries graduated at a ceremony on 9 October. Enugu comes next, with Governor Peter Mbah pledging his support ahead of the programme’s arrival in the Coal City on 28 October, and Kebbi is on the list after that. The FCT, the South-West, the South-East and the North-West.

Whether by design or not, that spread across the zones is the kind of fairness that builds confidence in a federal programme.

But numbers only tell you so much. The real story is in the people. Take Miss Balikis Soliu, a mathematics graduate of the University of Ilorin who teaches the subject for a living and has taken a makeup artistry course. Her words stuck with me: “I have been living only on salaries.” Any Nigerian teacher reading this knows exactly what she means. She wants her own space now and plans to combine the classroom with the makeup chair. That is not a beneficiary waiting for government handouts. That is a woman building a second leg to stand on.

Then there is Mr Akintunde Fabiyi, another mathematics and science teacher, who, in seven days, picked up graphic design, branding software, and how to put AI tools to work in his designs. What impressed me most was his honesty. He admitted that 10 days could not cover the whole syllabus and said the rest was up to him. He intends, in his own words, to “level up and scale up.” Give me 1,000 Fabiyis and I will show you a town that changes.

My favourite story, though, belongs to Mr Ogunyemi Aduragbemi. He used to be a fashion designer. He left the trade and went into buying and selling. Why? He could not afford the equipment. Read that again. That single sentence tells the story of millions of young Nigerians. The skill is not the problem. Capital is. The tools are. Aduragbemi now goes home with equipment, and he plans to run his tailoring alongside his trading. One man, two streams of income, and a dying skill have come back to life.

Dr Arogundade’s charge to the Ibadan graduates is worth repeating. “Don’t use it as a one-man solution or one-man empowerment. There’s a multiplier effect. Train your neighbours, train your community people,” she told them. This is our old apprenticeship system speaking. Long before any government programme, the Igbo trader trained his boy, the Yoruba tailor trained her apprentice, and the boy became the oga who trained the next boy. If every one of those 700 Ibadan graduates trains two people in the next year, we are looking at 2,100. Nobody has to fly in from Abuja for that.

The intervention has also been implemented in the classroom. More than 100 HP laptops have gone to schools, alongside training in robotics and AI, with Government Secondary School, Tudun-Wada, Wuse Zone 4, and Government Science and Technical College, Garki, among the first beneficiaries. A child who builds a small robot at 14 is far less likely to be recruited by a political thug at 19. Catch them young, as the old saying goes.

It is no surprise that the Olubadan of Ibadanland, Oba Rashidi Ladoja, called the programme a game-changer and urged others in Dr Arogundade’s position to follow her example. When a royal father of his standing speaks like that in public, it counts for something.

To be sure, ten days is a short time to master any trade. Some graduates will need start-up money, others will need mentors, and all of them will need customers.

It is encouraging that Dr Arogundade’s approach reportedly includes business grants and evaluation. My only plea is that the evaluation is made public. If, by this time next year, the government can tell Nigerians how many of the Ibadan 700 are earning a living from what they learnt, that report will do more for this programme than a hundred ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

Still, credit must be given where it is due. In a season when Nigerians are tired of hearing about poverty from people who have never missed a meal, here is a programme that is putting tools in hands and skills in heads, state by state, one graduation at a time.

Somewhere in Ibadan this week, a young man is threading a needle on a machine he could not afford a month ago. That is what poverty reduction looks like up close. It is not a press release. It is the hum of a sewing machine in a shop that did not exist last month. Multiply that sound by five million, and you begin to hear a different Nigeria.