Ecommerce as a Youth Empowerment Tool By Adedoyin Giwa

As the world celebrates the 2020 International Youth Day today, the need for youth empowerment will for sure hit the front burner even in the midst of global chaos caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2020 IYD celebration with the theme “Engagement for Global Action”, seeks to highlight how young people can be engaged at local, national and global levels to reduce democratic deficits, increase fairness in political processes and contribute to better and more sustainable policies.

It is no longer news that jobs have been lost and the world faces harsh economic realities as we learn to live with the novel virus. A committee on Economic Sustainability Plan led by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo recently warned that 39.4 million Nigerians might be unemployed by the end 2020. The federal government recently unveiled plans to employ 1,000 persons each from each of the 774 local governments in the country. In the same vein, the federal government post COVID-19 Economy Recovery Plan is said to be targeting 5 million jobs. In the midst of it all, giving youths, who constitute the majority of Nigeria’s population a fair economic share has always been a clamour.

While we keep on the demand for inclusion of youth in formal political mechanism, it is worthy of note that  ecommerce can help change the narrative about opportunity, inclusion and balance in the Nigerian economic landscape for Nigeria’s teeming youth population. A joint research by the World Bank  and Alibaba Group revealed that ecommerce can be a powerful instrument for employment for semi-skilled workers and women in developing countries and in rural areas. These are general traits of Nigeria and African countries in general.

Conversely, job creation figures of leading global ecommerce brands should be an encouragement for more focus and investment in this sector of the economy. America’s Amazon disclosed recently that over one million small businesses on its platform have created 900,000 jobs. The Amazon brand alone has over 100, 000 employees on its payroll. Today, China has the fastest and largest growing ecommerce market in the world, accounting for more than 40% of the total value of ecommerce transactions worldwide. Simply put, more than 5% of employment in China is in ecommerce. These contributions are however tied to years of deliberate support and infrastructure investment which aided ecommerce.