The United Kingdom plans to train Nigerian civil servants in basic digital skills, and support state governments to develop a digital economy policy and strategy.
The Country Lead and Programme Adviser, UK Government’s Digital Access Programme, Idongesit Udoh, said this in Abuja on Friday at the grand finale of the DigitalForAll Challenge organised by Tech4Dev in partnership with Microsoft.
She said, “We have some pipelines activities including upskilling basic digital skills for civil servants, partnering with some specific States on that.
“More importantly on the policy and systematic framework, we are supporting some state governments to develop their own state-level digital economy policy and strategy, which is to help entrench digital development at the state level.”
She further said that the UK government has constantly supported Nigeria in technology development.
“The UK is actively supporting Nigeria through tech development. And of course, we have worked with the federal government in the past on things like developing the national broadband plan.
“On the cyber front, we provided technical assistance to develop the new Nigeria national cybersecurity policy and strategy. And currently, we are working with the private sector on multiple fronts including digital skills for women and girls but also across the States from north to the south up-skilling on basic digital skills,” she said.
The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof Isa Pantami, who was represented by his Technical Adviser on Information Technology, Femi Adeluyi, called on the private sector to help the government in meeting its target of creating five million digital literates by 2030.
The grand finale of the #Digitalforallchallenge winner from the intermediate level, Theresa Sunday, got N2,500,000, the grand finale winner from the basic level, Nelson Didiam got N1,000,000, and the other six finalists went home with laptops.
