The Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Peter Jack, has disclosed that that Nigeria’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector has created about 12 million jobs from 2012 to date.
Jack said this at the eNigeria 2014, an annual information Technology (IT) summit organised by NITDA, with the theme “Creating Market Opportunities for Indigenous ICT Products and Services”.
“The ICT sector in Nigeria is currently boosting the Federal Government’s efforts in job creation as an average of 12 million jobs from 2012 to date have been created. This is in addition to contributing about 10.56 per cent to the growth of Nigeria’s GDP,” he said.
According to him, the number of jobs created by the ICT sector, is a significant improvement on the 2.5 million jobs also generated by the sector from 2002 to 2012.
“In view of the above achievement, the focus of eNigeria 2014 on technology start-ups and young innovators is considered very timely particularly at this time that World Bank and UK Department for International Development, DFID are supporting Nigeria to create jobs,” Jack disclosed.
He stated that NITDA, with the support of World Bank and UK Department for International Development, DFID also plan to create 460,000 more jobs across eight critical sectors in the Nigerian economy, having identified them as priority sectors, having identified the ICT sector in Nigeria as one of them.
Jack pointed out that ICT holds the greatest promise for achieving the transformation agenda of the present administration in Nigeria, due to the enormous potentials in it, especially the ability to drive other sectors for job creation.
“This is a great nation that has enough capabilities to step forward and make global rules and employ Nigerians to build global companies as we can no longer afford to hunker behind the “techno-nationalism” at home, while going into the global network of technology collaboration and research.
“In our quest for achieving vision 20:2020 therefore, we must take advantage of this golden opportunity to create jobs for our teeming youths while diversifying our economy from natural resource based to a knowledge-based economy driven by IT,” the NITDA boss said.
