ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND EMPLOYMENT GENERATION IN NIGERIA: A CASE STUDY OF NATIONAL DIRECTORATE OF EMPLOYMENT (N.D.E)

*Baba Sunday, **Dickson Vonke and ***Kromtit Matthew

Department Economics, University of Jos, Nigeria.

Emails: sundaybab@yahoo.com; vonkemarcus@yahoo.comAbstract: The Nigerian Job seekers face a lot of problems as Jobs are not made available, technical skills are not properly acquired for self employment, under capitalization with difficulty for obtaining bank credit and instability of government policies are the order of the day. In support for the Role of Entrepreneurship in National Economic Development, policies had been implemented by different government regimes such as Integrated Rural Development (IRD). But the failure of these development programmes did pave way for the introduction of Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) with the objective of designing programmes to adjust the structure of the economy whose strategies are National Directorate of Employment (NDE) amongst others. This study assesses the impact of entrepreneurship development on unemployment reduction in Nigeria using NDE as a case study.  While the Augmented Dickey Fuller Unit Root Test was employed in sieving the data series to avoid spurious results, the Granger Causality Test was used to determine the causal relationship between the variables and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) technique of econometrics was employed to estimate the impact of entrepreneurship development on unemployment reduction in Nigeria. Results obtained reveal that the 2000-2011 Nigerian Annual Data for NER, EER and CU series were non stationary at level, 1(0), but NER and EER became stationary at first difference, 1(1); while CU became stationary at second difference, 1(2) – all at 5% level of significance. The results further show we have some confidence that both ERR and CU could Granger cause NER in Nigeria and that entrepreneurship development has impacted significantly on unemployment reduction in Nigeria and the null hypothesis of no impact was rejected; Labor was discovered to be the main asset of the poor and this creates opportunities for them to be gainfully engaged. It is, therefore, concluded that Entrepreneurship has a significant impact on Employment generation in Nigeria. The study recommends amongst others that refocusing public spending and investment in basic and technical education on human capital in order to raise the supply of skilled labor in Nigeria is expedient and that the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) as government’s main organ for tackling the problem has to be repositioned by putting in place new strategies to reduced