By 
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) will be partnering with the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) to drive awareness and scale up adoption of emerging technologies in order to facilitate a sustainable digital economy in Nigeria.
RELATED: NITDA brings NAVSA smart farming to 50 NYSC members
“We are looking at positioning Nigeria to become the global talent factory and to do that, your agency is critical because all graduates pass through your organisation,” said Director General of the NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi during a recent visit of the Director General of the NYSC, Brig Gen.Yushau Dogara Ahmed to the IT regulatory and development agency in Abuja.
“If we can collaborate, we can use that one year they would spend serving the nation to change their lives,” Abdullahi added.
According to him, the fastest way to make the country join the league of developed nations would not be through the traditional way adopted by Asian countries for which they spent nothing less than fifty years to attain the status they are today.
Nigeria would have to be creative in its industrialisation quest. The shortcut to upping the ante remains the talent route, stressing that more that 55% of the country’s GDP is based on services.
The NITDA boss said that “there is a global talent shortage and if Nigeria can position itself by training people and conveniently providing two million developers in two years it can earn about $40B from the pool of two million developers, which will invariably also help address the agency’s remittance challenge as well.
“Looking at the fact that Nigeria can be the talent hub of the world, given its competitive advantage to close the gap, we have identified your Organization as a key partner, if we must achieve the projections.”
NITDA has since started implementing some of the initiatives, like training One Million Developers in 2022 which some of the Youth Corps members were beneficiaries.
“I am hoping that our collaboration will not only bring young Nigerians together to be trained on how to build mobile applications and systems but will also connect them to opportunities.
“We are strategising on how to expand the training to other states as we plan to pilot it in the six geopolitical zones but if we can work together with you, it will much easier for us to get the talents because you have graduates,” he stressed.
According to him, about 124 youths are trained and graduated every month from the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR), adding that, although this is the basic training, there are other categories, including intermediary and advance.
The National Director, NCAIR, Ya’u Garba took the visiting team through the workings of the centre as he highlighted the different programmes intended to scale awareness and adoption of emerging technologies.
Meanwhile, the Director General of the NYSC, Brig Gen. Ahmed in his brief said the purpose of the visit was to deepen existing collaboration between the NYSC and the agency over the years which he noted have been laudable, especially with the provision of Digital Economy Centres at NYSC Camps across some states.
Ahmed said the gesture has gone a long way in providing IT support to the organisation’s state secretariat and the scheme in general.
“I want to use this opportunity to solicit for NITDA’s support in assisting NYSC with some Information Technology (IT) equipment for the smooth take off our newly constructed Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Centre in our National Directorate Headquarters,” Ahmed said.
