The Nigeria Information Technology and Development Agency (NITDA) in collaboration with the Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) have joined hands to take digital literacy to rural communities.
At a five day train the trainers capacity development program for the School of Community Network (SCN) project held in Kano state, at least, 20 rural communities champions will undergo training on the rudiments of digital literacy.
Flagging up the training open, the Head of digital technology adoption unit under the digital economy department, NITDA, Ayodele Bakare said, the programme is aimed at providing dwellers of unserved and underserved communities with the digital literacy skills to be able to build community networks and also sustain it.
“We felt that dwellers in these areas are disenfranchised when it comes to access to broadband. There is a huge gap between them and those in urban areas.
“By the time they are properly equipped with the knowledge, they will have what it takes to build their own networks and also sustain it.
“We will ensure we build communities with the right digital skills in this fourth industrial revolution – industry economy solely on digital technology. We want to ensure that they can participate within this industry and also contribute effectively to digital economy.”
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Earlier in his welcome remarks, the Executive Director, CITAD, Yunusa Zakari Ya’u said the commencement of the first phase of the national digital literacy programme with NITDA will help in terms of bridging the gap in the digital divide.
He said, people who have digital skills are mostly found in urban areas and with the ICT space becoming part and parcel of our daily needs, every citizen should have the same opportunity to have the skill.
“We are hoping that through this training, rural communities will have opportunity to have whereto acquire digital skills.
“Our service providers were not able to cover the whole country, officially, there are about 114 clusters of communities were none of these network is able to provide satisfactory services.
“What we are doing in this programme is also to build the capacity of communities to be able to develop their own networks not relying on any private operator so that we can address communication gap.”
