The capability approach and national development in Nigeria: towards a youth transition model

This paper adapts a qualitative-dominant mixed method approach by utilizing policy documents, semi-structured interviews, a focus group discussion, and structured questionnaires (SQs) to explore the different bottlenecks that impedes the education–National Youth Service Corps (NYSC)–work transition, with a specific focus on the NYSC route. This paper reveals that youth’s (aged 18–30) ability to navigate the formal education phase partly depends on multi-stakeholder contributions that provide support structures to ensure youths obtain a tertiary degree before age 30. Successful completion of the formal education phase makes them eligible to be mobilized for 1-year mandatory service. While in the NYSC route, youth capability development programmes ensure that youths are further developed and deployed to opportunity structures needed to address national development needs. The challenge however is that both state mobilization processes and deployment practice create restrictive opportunity concerns that impede the effective functioning and freedoms for youth capabilities to thrive. This paper broadly contributes to human resource development practice by utilizing a youth capability analytic framework to better understand how well youth capabilities can be further developed and strategically aligned in addressing complex national development challenges as youth navigate the education–NYSC–work transition pathway.