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A sustainable future is hinged on technology innovation driven by digital illiteracy, Director General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, has stressed at the just ended Ogun Digital Summit in Abeokuta, south west Nigeria.
This has informed NITDA’s commitment to achieving “its ambitious target of 95% digital literacy by 2030,” Abdullahi told participants at the summit with the theme: “Digital Technology: Key to sustainable Future.”
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The NITDA boss urged youths to see tech as “the present and the future of today’s world; to take their innovative ideas from conception to impact and commercialize their technologies in order to contribute towards the growth of the nation’s digital economy.”
He added: “When you talk about innovation and technology, human talents constitute the major components to drive the two, as such; we need universities, institutions and corporate organizations to be part of the system because they play a key role of producing the needed talents that can solve identified problems the society.”
He enumerated efforts of the federal government in the areas of policy-making, creation of enabling environment, legislation, digital literacy, among others, which he stressed are all geared towards ensuring young innovators and entrepreneurs in the country thrive in their chosen fields.
His words: “In 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari redesignated the Ministry to cover Digital Economy, what that action entails is that the Federal Government is interested in the strength of your ingenuity and wants you to leverage on Information Technology (IT) for economic prosperity. The action also puts Nigeria on the digital map of global economy.”
Adding: “The government cannot give everyone seed funds or grants at the same time, which is the reason why you need to think outside the box and have something an investor would be interested in, that way, you would have had the needed funds to grow your products and services without the encumbrances of the sometimes tiring government bureaucracies.”
The NITDA boss expressed the hope that some of the participants who were majorly youths of Ogun state will be among the one million developers the agency plans to train in 18 months.
“Globally, there is a shortage of talents, so, we are creating a mandate to develop a talent strategy because we have a competitive advantage as a country with our vast human and natural resources. Nigeria can seize the opportunity to fill that gap,” he added.
