Adamawa Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Mr Garba Umar said the newly created Ministry for Entrepreneurship Development was established to address high poverty rate in the state.
Umar made this known Monday in Yola during his maiden familiarization visit to Adamawa office of Correspondents’ Chapel of the Nigeria Union of Journalists’ (NUJ).
Umar said the young administration of Gov. Ahmadu Fintiri inherited an impoverished and indebted state and saw the urgent need to come up with the ministry as part of measures to address the situation.
“We met an impoverished people and we are trying to see how we can empower them.
“We met youths that are restless and we felt the youth must be gainfully employed or provided with needed skills to gain employment.
“That’s why the government established the ministry for entrepreneurship; its deliberate that we should have a ministry that can trained and hatched responsible business men and women with the needed skills and capacity to come up with proposals that are bankable,” Umar said.
He also noted that the government also created the Ministry of Construction, Rehabilitation, Intervention and Humanitarian Services to address the challenges facing it, particularly that of internally displaced persons as it recover from the Boko Haram insurgency and other conflicts.
The commissioner who also spoke on the government effort to enhanced state owned media, urged for the chapel support to the government in its effort to get things better, adding that his office would always remain open to the media on matters regarding the state.
Responding, the chairman of Correspondents’ Chapel, Mallam Abdullahi Tukur lauded the commissioner for reaching out to the media for support and assured him the chapel’s commitment to continue to reports objectively activities in the state.