Bring Nigerian Women Back to Work After Career Breaks

Nigeria loses an enormous proportion of its professionally trained female workforce to career gaps caused by childcare, elder care, and spousal relocation. Most of these women want to return to professional work but face a combination of: outdated skills, gaps on their CV that bias recruiters against them, no affordable childcare, and organisations with no structured returnship programmes. The economic cost of this talent loss runs into trillions. Your challenge is to design a returnship programme for Nigerian professional women who have been out of the workforce for two or more years. It must retrain women in skills that have evolved during their absence, provide coaching that addresses the confidence and CV gap, place returners with employers, and include a childcare access solution. The programme must be completable while managing significant home responsibilities. Submit a programme design document (max 12 pages) including: the skills retraining curriculum, CV and confidence coaching model, employer partnership strategy, childcare solution design, programme schedule that accommodates home responsibilities, cost per participant, and a plan to place 500 women with employers in 12 months. Judging criteria: 35% programme design fit for women balancing home and retraining, 30% employer partnership and placement model, 20% childcare access design, 15% scale plan.