Precious Emelue

Precious Emelue is tackling the profound economic disjunctions in the oil rich Nigerian riverine states. He is building bridges between unemployed and alienated youth and the region's major international investors. His approach to training and assisting youth to set up and run businesses that have contractual relationships with major foreign investors has the potential to transform the historically difficult relationships across Africa between oil and mining transnationals and local communities.

Precious Emelue's idea is to give the local people a stake in oil exploitation and give the transnationals a way to benefit the local economy. To do this, he has rural youth participate in an alternative to traditional vocational training that puts greater emphasis on an immediate application of skills in the marketplace. It couples job-related training with a credit/finance mechanism aimed at new business creation and interventions with prospective customers for these new businesses to secure a position for trainee-produced goods in the local market.

Oil production in the riverine states, and in other parts of Africa as well, has been characterized by the construction of foreign enclaves cut off from the local population. In the riverine states this situation is further exacerbated by the area's geography. The area is swampy and most locations can be reached only by boat or helicopter. Outside the extraction enclaves there is profound poverty and high unemployment.Because of a paucity of opportunity, both adults and youths routinely commit acts of violence against the property of the oil companies and their employees, including harassment and kidnapping for the purpose of extorting money. This, in turn, invites a violent reaction from the military, creating a cycle of continuing violence and a growing disregard for the legitimacy of public authority.

Precious knew that, because the youths were very poor and the culture of violence was entrenched, if training was to have any chance of success in Ogoniland, he had to shorten the time between the onset of training and employment. Also, because most youths were supporting themselves by engaging in illegal activities, he had to find a way of separating them from dependence on those activities from the onset of their training if he was to have any real chance of claiming their attention and inducing them to change professions.Precious provides a small stipend while young people go through an initial phase of training for a specific type of job. This keeps absenteeism down to a minimum. The job training is done in consultation with local employers, including the major employer, Royal Dutch Shell, and several contractors and merchants. After basic training in carpentry or plumbing, the students move to work on job sites at an entry level. Precious intervenes with local employers to see that his students get priority for hiring and contracting over people coming in from outside the area.To finance his efforts, Precious has secured funding for the training from Shell as well as for a revolving loan fund in the amount of one million Naira (US $125,000) to be lent out to students graduating from the center who choose to set up their own businesses and demonstrate a contractual commitment to work. He helps graduating students set up their businesses and provides on-going assistance with book keeping as well as identifying opportunities with employers in the region. Assets acquired for the business, such as tools, are used as collateral for the loans, which carry an interest rate of twenty-one percent, well below the market rate for such loans.During the year that Precious' first center has been in operation, the crime rate in the area has fallen sharply. Approximately five percent of the young people who complete his job training program leave the area, ten percent go to work directly for the oil company, and eighty-five percent are employed in the local economy or start their own small companies.Based on this initial success, Precious plans to open three more training centers in the riverine states. This experience has convinced him of the need to rethink the approach to unemployed youth on a national level. His approach–providing enough skill to get started and continuing intervention to support the enterprise–does not require substantial investment in physical plant. He acknowledges Shell's significant financial injection for the first center, but argues that setting up further centers will cost less. Among other things, he can use proceeds from the repayment of the loans at his first center to provide the credit mechanism for at least partially financing additional training centers.

Precious was raised on a farm in Delta State. Because he had no sisters, he helped his mother do what he described as work traditionally reserved for women. His father had three wives. His mother was determined to send him to Catholic boarding school and earned the fees by tending her herd of goats and selling the milk and cheese.When Precious graduated from secondary school, he worked for an American company and began to save half of his salary in US dollars at a branch of a United States bank. He won a scholarship to the University of Kentucky where he majored in agricultural economics, tutoring other students to earn pocket money. After graduation he returned to Nigeria and, while working for the Ministry of Agriculture, caught the attention of the director of a Cameroon-based training nongovernmental organization, the Pan African Institute for Development. He joined the staff of the Institute as a research officer and trainer of administrators, where he focused on the needs of many small start-up nongovernmental organizations.Precious left the Institute in 1991 to establish his own organizational skills training agency, CODEP. He focused his work on local village work groups and creating village savings associations. He was instrumental in forming and strengthening a number of multi-village self-help groups, all of which featured his organization skills training component.In 1994, reacting to the growing problems in the riverine states, Precious decided to focus his work in that region and began doing studies of the needs of the local communities. He presented his findings to Shell, whose support during this diagnostic phase was limited to providing him with helicopter transportation due to the difficulty of access to the local communities. Shell accepted his recommendations and agreed to provide support for training and a credit mechanism for the first center Precious established in 1995.