By ZAKAA LAZARUS
Members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) enlisted as digital champions under the Federal Government’s Digital Literacy for All (DL4ALL) programme have trained over 500,000 Nigerians in basic digital skills since the commencement of the initiative.
The Director-General (DG) of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, disclosed this today at the NYSC Headquarters, Abuja, while presenting 8 laptop computers to Corps Members that were adjudged as outstanding in both their training and field performances at the national level of the exercise.
Recalling that the DL4ALL initiative stemmed from a Presidential mandate for NITDA to achieve 95% digital literacy by 2030, with an ambitious mid-term target of 70% by 2025, Abdullahi said the agency, in collaboration with the NYSC, trained seventeen thousand, seven hundred and sixty Corps Members across the country on digital literacy within a year.
In his words: “Approximately 80 champions per state are trained in each batch, amounting to nearly 17,760 champions annually nationwide. Each champion is tasked with training at least two Nigerians daily, translating to a minimum of 60 persons monthly.”
He averred that the NITDA-NYSC collaboration had also enabled accelerated diversification through industrialization, digitisation, creative arts, manufacturing and innovation.
“We have a large size of our population, who are not actively in the formal sector, which are doing petty businesses.
“We have our senior citizens, who are not digitally literate, but we want them to be part of this digital economy we are building,” he said.
The DG disclosed that NITDA had developed a national digital literacy framework in collaboration with the NYSC, adding that the agency would continue to empower Corps Members with IT skills that would enable them educate the public on basic digital skills.
He explained that the target was for each champion to train at least two people in a day and sixty in a month, adding: “this training is going to be one-on-one, in the market places, religious places and motor parks, because these people are mostly the vulnerable groups and victims of online fraud.”
In his remarks, the NYSC DG, Brigadier General Olakunle Nafiu, commended NITDA for encouraging digital literacy among Nigerians.
Nafiu said with over 400,000 graduates passing through the Scheme annually, NYSC was sending refined Corps Members with skills and necessary empowerment tools back to the society as job creators and employment ambassadors.
He added that the Corps Members were, as he put it, the perfect channel to drive the critical national objective of digital empowerment for all Nigerians.
Another highlight of the occasion was the presentation by the NITDA DG of a dummy cheque of N3.5 Million Naira to his counterpart of the NYSC for the Corps digital champions.
