The Federal Government has repeatedly told us that we are in for very difficult times. For a large percentage of our youths and graduates, this is no good news because quite a number of them are either unemployed or underemployed.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, out of a total youth labour force of 36,380,320 (representing 48 per cent of total labour force in Nigeria of 75.9 million), a total of 13,658,065 of them were either unemployed or underemployed in the third quarter of 2015.
This points to the fact that Nigeria is sitting on a time bomb and we need to stem the unemployment tide fast by getting our youths and young graduates busy and engaged. As someone who literally lives and breathes technology, the key question I have asked myself is: “How can we use technology to reduce unemployment especially by taking advantage of freelancing and online jobs?”
As a result of my concern, I was excited when I received the invitation of the Minister of Communications, Mr. Adebayo Shittu, who, in trying to chart a road map for the sector, invited ICT stakeholders from every nook and cranny of the country to the maiden retreat of the ministry, tagged Repositioning the Communications Sector as a Key Driver of the Nigerian Economy, held at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, Oyo State.
The key features of the retreat included a technical session and various strategy sessions that were held for the growth of the industry. I chose to join the strategic (syndicate) session that focused on Creating Two Million ICT Jobs Annually chaired by Florence Seriki, managing director, Omatek Computers.
Let me confess that at first, I had my doubts about attending the retreat because, like a lot of well-informed experts in various fields have said, Nigeria has a lot of fantastic policies in various spheres that can produce fantastic results if implemented properly.
Therefore, I thought that there was no new policy needed to be formulated for the various areas of our polity, but harnessing existing policies and setting machinery in motion to ensure proper implementation, what has been missing all the while.
Take China as an example; it started out with agriculture and gradually started to make in-roads into ICT for growth. Today, China is very close to being the largest world economy after the USA, if they have not even attained that feat yet. China is known for its exploits in the field of ICT with the production of series of tech gadgets such as smartphones, laptops as well as — Finish Reading on the Punch Website
