The Coordinator of Enugu Clean Team Project, Rev. Fr. Michael Ogbu, says the initiative has been a major boost to financial empowerment among youths within Enugu State.

Ogbu told newsmen in Enugu, the state capital, on Monday, April 10, 2023, after supervision of the cleaners, that since inception of the project in May 2018, it had employed 1,000 youths in the state.

According to him, the project has remained a source of succour to numerous families in Enugu State as it engaged the services of 1,000 youths whose responsibility it was to keep the streets tidy and package the waste for evacuation.

He said that the project was designed to take care of two needs – to help keep the environment clean in the aspect of road cleaning, desilting of drains in the state and also a sort of empowerment to the young people of the state.

Highlighting the impacts of the project in the past five years, Ogbu noted that aside from making the state clean, the aspect of human capital development could not be overemphasised.

He said that the young people are mainly students and the project has assisted them in getting money to pay for their tuition fees and taking care of their little needs in school and by his records they had l so many undergraduates, some of whom have graduated already.

Ogbu said the project had zero tolerance for subletting of the job and, every morning, the workers are in their respective workplace and to achieve this, proximity is given priority while recruiting the workers.

On the relationship of the project with the waste evacuation agency, the coordinator said that based on the job description, the work begins with gathering of the waste, bagging them and ends at keeping it at dumpsters where the evacuation team takes them out.