Compensation-Tied Apprenticeships and Agreement Defrayments in Developing Economy

— This paper examined the defrayment of agreement on compensation–tied apprenticeships with a view to encourage propagation of more vocation and crafts to grow the economy and reduce unemployment palavers in developing Nations. Both primary and secondary data were sourced through administration of structured questionnaire to six hundred respondents selected from one thousand respondents where more than 70% operators of compensation-tied apprenticeships and their apprentices resides in the south-East geo-political zones of Nigeria with particular focus on electrical appliances, automobile parts, building materials, textiles and iron-rods retailing. Simple random sampling technique was used to select respondents from each of the 5 randomly selected locations with a sample fraction of 50% and the ratio of apprentices to business owners studied of 4:1. The study revealed 60 (12%) apprentices under settlement with cash agreement, 20 (33.3%) defrayment while 40 (67.7%) records of declension were recorded and only 4 (20%) of those that were settled eventually continued in the business whereas apprentices that were settled with pre– settlement business 412 (93.6%) are settled and only few 28 (6.4%) declension were recorded while 402 (98.7%) of those that are settled comfortably continued with the business learnt while only 5 (1.3%) records of declensions were recorded. Also the computed x2 = 22 is greater than 3.84 which shows that defrayment declension would aggravate the problem of unemployment and other economic cum social vices in developing countries. The study therefore concludes that the rate of continuity of apprentice settled with cash payment is highly susceptible to declension and that declension of defrayment of agreed settlement is generally detrimental to continuation of apprentices in the vocation or craft learnt and thereby adding to problems of social vices. It is therefore clear that the approach used in settling the agreed settlement obligations is a sine–qua-non to effective development and unemployment reduction in a developing economy when the practitioners defaults at any rate