Youth dev’t: FCT partners UNESCO, Microsoft on ICT training

Relief came the way of Federal Capital Territory (FCT) youths yearning for improved life from strangulating unemployment when United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and global software giant, Microsoft, in collaboration with FCT Administration (FCTA) launched the Youth Mobile Initiative to promote and empower 400 youths in the territory.

The project is expected to train the youths, especially women, within 8 – 10 months with skills on ICT competence development. This will enable them promote and sell locally relevant mobile applications that will solve issues of sustainable development and provide self-generating funds and viable employment opportunities in the mobile environment.
The Country/Regional Representative of UNESCO, Mr. Yau Ydo, revealed this at the launch of the Youth Mobile Initiative in FCT recently.

He said the preference of UNESCO’s commitment is towards meaningful ventures especially in the area of Information and Communication Technology development, adding that the UNESCO youth mobile initiative was created in 2014 to offer introductory courses in computer programming, learning to code, problem solving and learning to learn.

Ydo said: “This initiative seeks to support links between the works of skills application, entrepreneurship, and marketing so that beneficiaries of this initiative particularly our applied youths will get more opportunities to effectively use their skills for giving shape to their ideas as viable real life business activities.

The youth mobile programme contributes towards the building of increasing knowledge societies by enhancing information and communication technology base to empower youth to resolve and identify local issues of sustainable development, especially those related to poverty reduction, climate change and disproportionate youth employment through the use of smart mobile applications.”

He acknowledged that the ICT sector plays a strategic role in economic development of countries by increasing interactions between industries, services and local content and has significantly contributed to the economic growth cycle and job creation in recent years.
“It is expected that ICT would produce effects similar to those used by major technology hub development during industrial revolution which began in the 19th century hence the need to take advantage of it especially, as the next 1 billion new internet connections is projected to be from mobile devices in the hands of young people in the continent,” he said.

The UNESCO Country/Regional Representative also said the collaboration with FCTA will significantly grow the reach of the programmes and the impact on target beneficiaries to create employment opportunities for the participants which is one of the main goals of the FCTA, urging other stakeholders to come on board.

Representative of Microsoft, Mr. Shola Amosun, in his remark, said Microsoft has a commitment to empower every individual and organisation to achieve more to realise their potentials, noting that one of the key ways to be able to do that is to get them ready for the 21st century opportunities.

This is why we are partnering with UNESCO and the FCTA to be able to achieve this initiative and we hope that this would be the foundation for something very good. We hope that these young people will be beacons of hope in their communities, that they will create solutions, services and products that will eventually become very useful on the global scale, but will first and foremost solve problems in the local scale”, he said.

FCT Minister, Malam Muhammad Musa Bello, commended UNESCO for the intervention, as well as for other various supports and by extension the entire United Nations family to residents of the FCT particularly the funding of about N53 million contributed towards the training.
He charged the recipients of the training to be serious, saying ”for those of you who are in the first batch of this training, you are lucky because you are in good hands. You are going to be trained on a combination of activities done over a number of years in many countries, so obviously the experience of UNESCO with each training programme is going to be imparted to you, and of course, the latest technology in the area.

Bello, who promised that the training is going to be continuous, also revealed that the number of youths especially women to be trained in FCT will be higher. He therefore charged them as the foot soldiers to move to the larger society to impart and encourage the move to ICT superhighway, adding that by so doing also it will provide empowerment for the youth.

He said: All these are critical components of this Administration’s drive and that of President Muhammadu Buhari to ensure that youth unemployment is approached in such a manner that when they are empowered, they become economic drivers of the communities, and at the end of the day, they are going to be heads and employers of labour.”