Nigeria to make digital literacy compulsory — NITDA

The federal government will make digital literacy in the nation’s education curriculum compulsory, the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Abdullahi, has said.

Abdullahi disclosed this at a media parley with the media on Wednesday in Abuja while presenting NITDA’s roadmap on digital literacy, saying that one of the initiatives of the agency was for the Federal Ministry of Education to include digital literacy in the nation’s education curriculum.

He said, “We are working with the Ministry of Education to review the curriculum across the formal education, from nursery to university, so that we can infuse digital literacy in our formal education, and by doing that, we can empower Nigerians to have digital skills before graduating.”

He added that, “We are also conceptualising other initiatives like; we will unveil the Digital Literacy for All Initiative very soon which will educate Nigerians outside the formal education and have access to quality digital content so that they have the knowledge to navigate around digital technology and digital economy.”

He noted that women, children and people with special needs would not be left out in the digital literacy drive.

He said, “Apart from digital literacy, we are going beyond that to digital sovereignty so that we can develop all our digital innovations in-country.

“Therefore, we conducted a skills gap assessment to identify skills in high demand locally and globally, and based on that, we have identified 12 tech skills in high demand and we used that to design the 3 Million Tech Talent initiative which is to train three million Nigerians on those 12 identified tech talents in high demand.

“The idea is that when we train them, some will be able to serve the local market and some leave Nigeria to get jobs elsewhere for brain export, not brain drain.”