Building ICT skills for Nigeria’s workforce will boost economy - Dr Adinde

Why do you place much emphasis on building ICT capacity Nigeria’s workforce?

We are doing that because of the firm belief that capacity building, particularly in the ICT sector, will boost the economy in no small measure. And we work together with the public and private sectors to develop their workers’ capacities, especially in ICT skills. of

What is the ADAPTI Programme of your agency all about?

Well, anytime I meet the press they want to know about the ADAPTI Programme. ADAPTI Programme happens to be the DBI flagship programme. ADAPTI stands for Advance Digital Appreciation Programme for Tertiary Institution. It is a programme that had been with DBI for over a decade sponsored exclusively by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), our parent institution, as an intervention programme for supporting capacity building across tertiary institutions in Nigeria.

Over the past 14 years since the commencement of ADAPTI, DBI has trained over 40,000 academic and non-academic staff of tertiary institutions. So ADAPTI continues to be an important programme for supporting capacity building in this digital age; it is helping to increase ICT skills penetration; it is helping us to increase awareness and acquisition of ICT skill, and increase digital literacy not just in public universities, but even in the private universities which also benefit from ADAPTI.

The World Bank came out with a report that Nigeria is underinvesting in human capital development, how will DBI help to bridge this gap?

Well, we know it and we can say it from a cursory observation of the kind of skills that abound in our economy. Today, like I said earlier, many are unemployed not because they don’t have education, but because they don’t have the requisite skills that the industries need. So we can distinguish between unemployment as a result of jobs not been available, and unemployment as a result of not having the employable skills that the industries demand and that is where the World Bank report is important.

The World Bank report is important to Nigeria to the extent that it also indicates, number one, that we need to begin to develop skills that the modern economy needs. The skills that are required by modern economy and those skills are mostly digital skills.

Many of our young people do not have the requisite digital skills to play in the modern economy, and that is where DBI comes in. Most of the programmes that we offer today are designed to help our young people - graduates across all disciplines - that will enable them to mainstream into the modern economy.

We are hoping that with the kind of intervention the institution of government like NCC is doing and the Federal Government is doing in various areas, that over time, we will be able to bridge this gap.

There is a whole lot that is beginning to happen because developing skills is not just to sit to face the first classroom environment, we also recognise that there are other avenues from which skills can be built. So DBI is also taking the initiative to drive what is called National Occupational Skills System which will target vocational skills development in ICT.

A lot of computer villages that are scattered across the country if you get into them you will find out that guys are doing stuffs not necessarily because they have degrees or certificates but because they acquired skills.

So, increasingly we want to focus on that area to ensure that this skills are also recognised and the government will begin to say that skills development is not about certificate, it is about what you can do. If you go to Efab Plaza (in Abuja) today for example, you will see that there are a lot of youth who are fixing phones, tablets and can repair your computers and they don’t have degrees in ICT. That is the kind of thing we think we should begin to encourage because they are job opportunities in that sector.

Most of those people do not need jobs, they can be on their own if you prepared them. That is where we are hoping that we will develop those skills that people will acquired that skill and they don’t look to the government; they can set up on they own and do things on they own.

Are you targeting a particular number of people DBI got an accreditation from NBTE to run…

Well on our accreditations, I can say it is getting to two years now that we have been certified and accredited to award NID by the NBTE. DBI is an innovation enterprise institute specialising in development of academic programmes for specific areas in telecom and computer hardware, in multimedia, in networking and system security.

So we began the programme two years ago, and the first batch will be graduating at the end of this academic session. And we are doing well, we matriculated the second set about a week back - about 83 of them 104 altogether from both campuses Lagos and Kano. The programme is doing very well. We have students across the five disciplines were we are running the programme currently and we are receiving a lot of accurate reports of how students are doing.

Indeed I am happy to report to you that the first set of our students sat for Microsoft Office certification exam and recorded a 100% success. So this is something that we would like to do. What it means for our students is that before they graduate they will take an ICT certification exam that enhances their job prospects in the market because it is not just about the academic, the industry also recognises ICT certification.

DBI is working hard to make sure that our students not only go through our programme, they also go through certifications before they graduate.

So, increasingly we want to focus on that area to ensure that this skills are also recognised and the government will begin to say that skills development is not about certificate