The Minister of Youths and Sports Development, Mr Sunday Dare, on Tuesday said African youths need digital skills development for the 21st century economy. He made this statement during in a webinar monitored in Abuja and hosted by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
The webinar focused on ‘Youth Power in Combating Mis and Dis-Information during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond’. The meeting also reiterated the need for the deployment of the Media and Information Literacy (MIL) framework launched by UNESCO in 2011.
The sports minister said that COVID-19 had unleashed the potential and creative minds of youths which leverages on technology, he said:
“Technology should be harnessed and used for positive purposes more than the negatives”.
“In Nigeria, we discovered that there are digital skills gap and our youths need digital skills for the 21st century economy.
“There are over 200 digital skills but for Africa’s criticality, we identified 15 to 25 skills that our youths need to position them to be effective for digital economy,”
The minister said that the country developed Digital Skills Literacy, Entrepreneurship, Employable and Leadership (DEEL) programme as an action plan to help upgrade Nigerian youths.
Dare said the programme is targeted at improving the skills of 500,000 to one million youths in the next two years so that they could adapt to technology and solve problems in various sectors of the economy.
He stated that the country is into collaborations with IBM and International Telecommunications Unit, among other institutions, leveraging on technology for development.
Mr Yao Ydo, the Regional Director of UNESCO, said that with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, people resorted to online platforms to seek information and answers.
He hoped that the meeting would harness the power of the youths on digital technology, innovation for transformation of the African society and human development.