The Nigerian Communications Commission has disbursed financial grants and an endowment of N500m in seven years.
It has also urged the Nasarawa State Scholarship Board to support the NCC in creating awareness about the intervention projects of the commission concerning research and digital literacy to provide more opportunities for the citizenry.
According to a statement issued while speaking at the delegation board event recently, the Director of Digital Economy at the Commission, Dr. Augustine Nwaulune, recalled that Nasarawa State is one of the beneficiaries of NCC’s Information and Communication Technology intervention projects.
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This includes Digital Awareness Programme for secondary schools, the Advanced Digital Appreciation Programme for Tertiary Institutions, the Wireless Cloud, as well as the E-Health programme.
Nwaulune said, “While we don’t give scholarships to students, the NCC has continued to give research grants to lecturers and students in the universities, and provided additional opportunities including sponsoring competitions involving students, as well as endowing professorial chairs in universities across the country.
“In the last seven years, the financial value of the endowments and grants is more than N500m.
“Therefore, I will appeal to NSSB to create awareness about these initiatives of the NCC among stakeholders in the academia, particularly the research grants to enable stakeholders to leverage such opportunities offered by the Commission to scholars interested in carrying out telecommunications-based research.”
Nwaulune added the NCC had been active in ensuring the implementation of the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy, 2020-2030, in which one of its eight pillars, rests on digital literacy, while the Digital Economy Department has been set up and equipped by the commission with the human resources needed to organise its programmes in factual terms.
The Board’s Executive Secretary, NSSB, Hajia Saadatu Yahya, whose delegation visited to discuss areas of collaboration for deepening digital/technical training and skills acquisition in Nasarawa State, lauded the commission for the central role it has played in promoting digital awareness and skills across the country.
Yahya implored that Nasarawa State was given more opportunities to benefit from NCC’s social investments and other digital economy-focused interventions, being the closest state to the Federal Capital Territory, the base of the commission.
She said, “The purpose of our visit is to seek collaboration with the NCC in whatever ways possible, especially in the areas of scholarship, and ICT skills and literacy for our people.
“ICT is the engine room of the global economy and we do not want to lag in this new digital order, hence, our decision to seek collaboration with organisations in the ICT space such as yours to work which, especially because you are contiguous to our State.”
Other members of the delegation, including Senior Special Assistant to Nasarawa State Governor on Information and Communication Technology, Haruna Sani; and the President, Nasarawa State Students Association, Sani Jibrin, spoke in favour of a greater collaboration with the NCC which would add the needed impetus to the current efforts by the state government to leverage ICT for economic.
