The maiden edition of the NYSC Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development Festival has commenced in Abuja.

The three-day event, which has the theme: "Inculcating the Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurial Mindset in our Youths for Self-reliance and National Development," features engagement of Corps members in skill competition, products exhibition and fashion parade among others.

Declaring the festival open at the NYSC FCT Orientation Camp, Kubwa, the Director-General, Brigadier General Sulaiman Kazaure, said the festival was designed to provide platform for Corps members to showcase their business and vocational skills to Nigerian investors and other stakeholders.

This, he said, would attract funding and material support as well as greater networking with the business community.

"It is to celebrate the innovation, commitment and ingenuity of our Corps members, who have fully embraced the policy of the present administration to revive the economy by developing Small and Medium Enterprises," he added.

Kazaure noted that since the introduction of the SAED programme, there was a geometric increase in the number of Corps members that had recognized the importance of self-employment instead of relying on white collar jobs that were not always easy to come by.

He further stated that a good number of the Corps members, who acquired general entrepreneurial and specific vocational skills, had shown high aptitude in their chosen businesses and were doing very well.

The Director-General urged participants at the festival to use the opportunity to enhance their skills while also promoting the much desired national unity and integration.

Earlier in a welcome address, the Director of General Services, Alhaji AbdulRazak Salawu, said the SAED programme had the capacity to contribute to the growth of the nation's economy.

He noted that the government's policy of encouraging the patronage of made-in-Nigeria goods would enable the SAED to lead the way for Nigeria to achieve the same feat as some Asian countries whose economic growth was driven by activities of small and medium enterprises.

In her address, the Acting Director of SAED, Mrs. Mojisola Eboagwu, said the festival would feature competitions in fashion design, food processing, leather works, shoemaking, beads making and ICT.

Eboagwu said 971,272 Corps members had been sensitized since the inception of the SAED programme out of whom 476,879 went through post-camp training, and over seven thousand have established thriving businesses.

Corps members drawn from the thirty-six states of the Federation and the FCT are participating in the competition, which is taking place at different centres in Abuja.