President Bola Tinubu has mandated the training for millions of citizens especially youths in digital skills within the next 2-3 years.
The Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani, announced this during the sidelines of the ongoing 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly, at the SDG Media Zone.
Speaking on the topic: “How to promote poverty eradication in developing countries”, he emphasised the importance of harnessing the power of digital technology to increase productivity.
Bosun noted that there’s need to leverage on the use of technology to address so many issues, and the government is focusing on critical sectors especially agriculture (food security).
He said,
“The President (Tinubu) has mandated that in the next two to three years, we have to train a million technology talents in Nigeria.
“What we are doing now at this phase, is to pull people together from the industry – tech startups.
“We are also working with foundations and development agencies for us to put our resources together to meet the set targets. YouTube, Google, and the likes will be invited to train youths. We are harmonizing all these programmes.
“We are on a good trajectory in Nigeria. We are harmonizing our identity system. We recognize power of digital technology to improve education and to also reimagine how we solve problems. We’ll increase significantly the number of jobs we’ve in the tech space. We are working hard to become next exporter of technology talents.
“Nigeria is a key player in agriculture. More innovative practices in agriculture sector will create opportunities. It is a priority for my ministry, and this will be done by collaborating with the Agriculture ministry.
“We want Nigeria to be able to raise more than $4bn for start ups. We want to be able to make significant progress on digitalisation of government services.”