Youth and Women Empowerment i n Nigeria: Catalyst f or Poverty Eradication

Abstract

The socioeconomic status of rural and urban areas in every country could be enhanced through the empowerment of youth and women folk whose activities spread across almost all sectors of the economy. The scrutiny in this study is basically on innovation, skills acquired through empowerment and the resulting entrepreneurial activities in stimulating growth in Nigeria. Data covering 2002-2021 sourced from the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics and issued by the Central Bank of Nigeria statistical Bulletin were used. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag model was employed to analyze data since the findings revealed that youth and women's entrepreneurial activities contributed insignificantly to economic growth in the period considered. The R-Squared ( 0.629882) in the ARDL estimate indicates that all the variables used contributed 62.98 per cent to growth in the period considered, while all factors or variables not captured in the model are responsible for the remaining 38 per cent growth in the economy. The F-Statistics value, 1.259266 in the ARDL Bound test, is less than the 2.86 under the I(0) bound at a 5% significance level, which shows no long-run relationship between the GDP and all the explanatory variables. It also showed that youth and women empowerment positively affects unemployment reduction in Nigeria, but the statistical value is insignificant. This study recommended, among others, that Steps to reduce or stop the persistent increase in the general price should be taken by this present government and that a single exchange rate system should be adopted. At the same time, a climate for industries to thrive should be provided to increase production and stem the depreciation of the naira.