Female participation in the National Youth Service Corps has surpassed male mobilisation figures every year since 2021, the scheme's Director General, Brig. Gen. Olakunle Nafiu has revealed.

Nafiu made this known at a News Agency of Nigeria forum in Abuja ahead of the scheme's 53rd anniversary, describing the trend as a milestone in education and gender inclusion. He noted that male graduates dominated mobilisation from the scheme's establishment in 1973 until 2020, before the shift occurred.

"Since 2021, more females have consistently participated in the scheme than males," he stated, attributing the change to progress in education and gender equality policies.

The Director General linked the development to sustained global and national efforts promoting girl child education and women's empowerment.

"It is not magic. The Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals placed a premium on girl child education and gender equality," he disclosed.

Nafiu projected that Nigeria would experience a significantly larger female workforce within the next 10 to 15 years, urging organisations and human resource systems to begin preparing for those shifts.

"In the next 10 to 15 years, we are likely to have a larger female workforce with increased requests for maternity leave and childcare related welfare support," he noted, adding that policymakers and employers must anticipate demographic changes that could reshape workforce composition and social policy planning.

"There are always unintended consequences. When efforts are concentrated on accelerating growth in one area, that area may eventually overtake the other," he observed.

On the Nigerian Education Repository and Databank, Nafiu confirmed it was designed to preserve academic records and strengthen documentation of graduates' research outputs nationwide.

"It is a government policy that mandates graduates to upload their theses, projects, and academic works into a databank for record and academic referencing purposes," he explained, adding that NYSC serves as a natural enforcement platform since most graduates proceed to the scheme immediately after completing their academic programmes.

"Government knows that the next stop for most graduates is NYSC, so the scheme naturally becomes an enforcement tool for implementing the policy," he added.

Nafiu confirmed that discussions were ongoing to integrate the databank digitally with NYSC operations through Application Programming Interface connectivity to simplify compliance for prospective corps members.