The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has called for a shift from simply training young people in digital skills to ensuring those skills translate into jobs, businesses and improved livelihoods across Africa.
NITDA Director-General/CEO, Kashifu Abdullahi, made the call during a high-level panel on “Scaling Africa’s Digital Workforce” at the Digital Skills and Talent Session of Nigeria at Scale: Building Digital Systems for Shared Prosperity, held on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly.
Abdullahi, who joined Gabon’s ICT Minister, Mark Doumba, and technology investor Oji Udezue on the panel, identified the transition from training to productive work as one of the continent’s major digital workforce challenges.
He said Nigeria was responding by linking digital literacy, advanced technical skills, connectivity, cloud infrastructure and job creation under a coordinated digital transformation agenda.
The NITDA chief cited the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) programme, which has trained more than 143,000 fellows across three cohorts, as well as the Talent Registry designed to connect verified digital skills with employers.
He also highlighted Project BRIDGE, which targets at least 90,000 kilometres of open-access fibre and an expanded national backbone of about 125,000 kilometres covering all 774 local government areas.
Abdullahi stressed that Africa’s digital workforce must extend beyond formal employment to include traders, farmers, artisans, mechanics, transport operators, food vendors and other entrepreneurs who can use technology to improve their livelihoods.
He called for greater focus on closing the gap between learning and earning, saying digital training should ultimately produce measurable economic opportunities and better livelihoods.
