World Bank 'Access Nigeria' Program: Worth The Effort ?

I hope moderator will bring this to the front page. This is the story.

Sometime in 2011, around March, we got invitation to attend a World Bank sponsored training called ACCESS Nigeria. The program was held in several cities across the country, which includes Ibadan, PH, Abuja, Kaduna and others.

We were made to go through a 3hours intial examination to prone down the number of people that will be selected for the training. After being selected, we were giving a 10 weeks training at Multi-Mix Academy, going to Eric Moore and Ikeja for our theory and practical classes respectively three days in a week for 10 weeks.

At the end of the training, every trainee were made to take another examination in order to evaluate then and prone down the number to those that meet the standard - I suppose. Meanwhile, the impression we were given was that after all said and done, candidates that meets all requirements will be placed on internship after which prospective employers will then decide to take you on if you are up to the task. Let me quickly add that the program was meant for final year students in the University.

To our greatest surprise, that is those of us that took part in the trainning and examination and passed, the organisers (World Bank, Hewitt-Aon, and the Step B Project) then organised an open job fair at the national thearter for everyone to attend and meet prospective employers. And guess who are this prospective employers; NIIT, New Horizon, APTECH, JOB Finders, HR Consult, GT Bank, UBA, Multi-Mix Academy. Majority of them, except GT and UBA, are training providers and job placement recruiters. You will drop your CV with them and expect to call for you for jobs when they are available.

The question is, what is the essence of the trainning and series of examinations we were made to go through in the first place afterall?

To make matters worst, people came from this other centers, particularly from PH, Kano, Adamawa (I saw some folks who chartered a bus from Kebbi and Adamawa, they took part in the series of programs at their respective locations).

I wish this makes front page and the organisers will see it to react. But as far as I'm concernned, the objectives of all the troubles we were put through has been defeated. For them to have thrown the job fair open to even those that didn't taka part in the selection process and all that was unufair and an injustice on their part. For them to have brought in NIIT, and all that into a job fair says a lot about them. Is NIIT an employer or a training institue? They were just there to market their product just like majority of the so called employers of labour, perhaps with the exception of GT Bank and UBA. Even these two banks will not collect your soft copy CV except hard copy- they will just throw it somewhere at the end of the day.

They just wasted our time, energy and resources. Some people even had to rush down from NYSC camp to finish the course. And do you know that we were not given a dime for all these exercise, it was all at our cost. So, what are we saying? For them to only throw us among people who had masters degree and years of experience at an open job fair. I can go on and on but...