The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) have trained no fewer than 300 corps members in Osun on business startups and improving existing businesses.
The 20-day training initiative, which was held at the NYSC Permanent Orientation Camp in Ede, had corps members drawn from all the batches in the state.
Mrs Olutayo Samuel, NYSC Deputy Director and Head of Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneur Development (SAED) in the Osun office, told NAN on Tuesday in Osogbo that the programme was to enable corps members start a business or improve existing ones.
Samuel said the training programme was tagged: “Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB)”
According to him, SIYB is aimed at ensuring corps members who have business skills and those yet to have but are interested in having are trained to become entrepreneurs.
She said that more than 600 corps entrepreneurs had been trained by SIBY.
Samuel said NYSC trainers were drawn from states across the country, adding that 300 corps members from Osun and 300 from Abuja were the first beneficiaries of the initiative.
Earlier, Mr Tasenga Nelson, an ILO Master Trainer from Uganda, said the objective of the global body was to partner with organisations to develop the capacity of their staff to meet the needs of their target audience.
Nelson said the rate at which businesses were dying in Africa was alarming.
He said only 25 per cent of new businesses made it to the third year, adding that what SIYB intended to do was to provide corps entrepreneurs with interventions that would make their businesses sustainable and profitable.
