Professionalise youth work for development, Olaopa tasks stakeholders

The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, has asked stakeholders, including government and researchers, to properly recognise the contribution of youth work to national development.

In a keynote address he delivered at the Federal Ministry of Youth Development/University of Abuja Collaborative Workshop at the University of Abuja Main Campus, Olaopa pointed out that the urgent goal for youth-work education stakeholders is to promote a positive view of the youth’s character and potential, particularly as a category with inherent value and as a special asset for the advancement of the country.

He said the youth work discipline has the potential to “generate an intellectual rigour that confronts the misalignment of youth work into a developmental category that is removed from all significant relevance.

“Youth work education provides a space for more expert and professional interventions that are rooted in basic research, policy intelligence, analysis and advocacy, and professional curation of what it means to intervene in the youth question,” he stated.

Professionalisation, Olaopa noted, will serve as the foundation for the establishment of communities of practice and service that establish the standard of practice, code of conduct, and ethics by which youth work and its quality are improved through a proper philosophy of change and transformation.

Moreover, it would promote the creation of youth work practitioners whose devotion and allegiance to the field and to young people might help to create public trust, as well as serve as the foundation for true policy shifts that care about youth.

“This speaks to the fact that youth work and its professionalisation cannot be rendered in academic terms alone. It requires a stakeholder approach that brings together the government, researchers, non-governmental and non-state actors and agencies, community organisations, policymakers and the youth themselves. The Nigerian government, as part of its significant and timely commitment to the professionalisation of youth work, also has to create an allowance to accommodate the services, commitment and passion of non-professionals whose non-profit charitable and philanthropic efforts and scope of programme interventions have sustained youth work so far in Nigeria,” he said.

According to him, this is a real policy concern that has to be negotiated and aligned with the formal frameworks that the government regulates.

“This then also implies that in professionalising youth work, the government must necessarily harness the entire workforce, formal and informal, involved in youth work and incentivise them to produce results. In other words, part of this long-term investment requires attending to, capacitating and regulating the relationship between the non-core professionals and the low-income but earnest volunteers who have been toiling in the field of youth work while the professionalisation effort had been underway. It is the efforts of these workers that have been preparing the ground for the triumph of policy shift in youth work.

According to Olaopa, as the government commences the drive to the professionalisation of youth work in Nigeria, the amount of investment required would be enormous, translating to higher costs for parents, government and youth charitable organisations.

He noted in this regard that the ministry must channel creative energy on how cost as a factor in professionalisation might be defining for the implementation of the policy in focus.

Olaopa lauded President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the Federal Executive Council for the visionary policy that recognises the significance of the youth in national development and is ready to “push the harnessing of the youth bulge to press Nigeria’s developmental advantages in the twenty-first century.”