Youth empowerment includes all various ways of creating opportunity for youth to learn and prepare them for future roles and challenges for adulthood. It involves encouraging and developing the youth towards becoming self-employed and financially productive.
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It is a process of making youth gain needed skills for imparting their lives and the entire society. It has to do with provision of enabling environment or conditions which help youth to make important decision of lives by themselves rather being directed by others.
Various youth empowerment skills
- Life working coping skills: These are affective, cognitive, and psychomotor skills useful for dealing with life problems and whose cautious accusation promotes individual growth.
They are also defined as skills we use to offsets the disadvantages of day to day life. Positive coping skills help us to get through situations at the same level as those who do not have disadvantages. Negative coping skills provides short term relieve or distraction but will definitely works in the situation e.g. using alcohol, hard drugs to supress depression.
Some coping strategies suggested by Chesney M. (2005) in a British Journal.
- Break up setting problems down.
- Sort out what can be changed and what cannot be changed
- Make a plan of action and follow it when confronted with a problem
- Leave options opened when things get stressful
- Think about a part of the government at a time
- Find solutions to your most difficult problems
- Resist the impulse to act hastily when under pressure
- Think positively to yourself
- See things from other peoples point of view during repeated arguments
- Take your mind off unpleasant talks
- Look for something good in negative situation
- Pray or meditate
- Get support from friends and families
- Try other solutions to your problems if your first solution does not work.
- Manipulating Skills: These are the skills in which individual learn how to handle object with precision in accordance with speed and control. It is the ability to manipulate things and objects with the help of body or art of the body. It includes physical activities like tossing a ball, kicking, typing, using scissors, legible writing, playing piano, the act of persuation. There are two types of manipulating skills (i) Fine motor skill (ii) Gross motor skills.
In relationships, manipulating skills can be strategies that are used to control the through cohesion (overt, covert) another person’s thought, feeling and behaviour.
Manipulating skills include:
- The use of power: this includes physical, verbal or intellectual intimidations or treats.
- Unsolicited rescuing/helping: this is doing things for other when they do not ask for it. Such a person becomes indebted to you hence; they are forced to do for you in future.
- Guilt: this is making others responsible trying to recollect your past favours
- Weakness: been threatened to become helpless, fearful, needy, incompetent etc.
- Intellectual skills: These are skills that need peculiar cognitive (thinking) activity.
TYPES OF INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
- Mathematical reasoning: this is the ability to analyse and calculate the abstract pattern. It includes the ability to work numerically with symbols and mathematical relationship
- Ability to describe: these skills are thought a child in colours, shapes, sizes etc
- Vocabulary activity: adult have this skills to use words as a result of their experiences.
- Inductive reasoning: this is the skill to make generalization / interference on the bases of observation
- Communication skills: these skills of abilities in the aspect of language, understanding, good communication and practical language skills involves exchanging information, sharing symbols like mathematics and languages. Information can also be through visual cue, tone, voice quality, eye contact, physical closeness etc.
TYPES OF COMMUNICATION SKILLS
- Expressive skills: it is passing accessed information to another person. These is done in three stages:
- Get the attention of the person
- Convey the information to him
- Check if he understands what you have communicated
- Listening Skills
- Skills to manage the overall process
- Artistic skills: this skill involves producing visual representation. They include skills like drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, wood carving, print making and mosaic etc.
ASSIGNMENT
Explain fives roles of government in empowering Nigeria youth
See also