NCC Canvasses Support From State Scholarship Boards On Digital Literacy Awareness
The Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) has urged the Nasarawa State Scholarship Board (NSSB) and other scholarship agencies across Nigeria to support the NCC by creating awareness about the intervention projects of the Commission concerning research and digital literacy to provide more opportunities for the citizenry.
This was disclosed by the Director of Digital Economy at the Commission, Dr. Augustine Nwaulune, who recently hosted a delegation of the Board, led by the Board’s Executive Secretary, Hajia Saadatu Yahya, on behalf of the Executive Vice Chairman of the Commission, Prof. Umar Garba Danbatta.
He said Nasarawa State remained one of the beneficiaries of NCC’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) intervention projects such as the Digital Awareness Programme (DAP) for secondary schools, the Advanced Digital Appreciation Programme for Tertiary Institutions (ADAPTI), the Wireless Cloud, as well as the E-Health programme.
“Even though 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 N500 million.”
“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 said.
Nwaulune said the NCC has been upbeat in ensuring implementation of the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy (NDEPS), 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 required to coordinate its programmes in concrete terms.
In his remarks, the NSSB Executive Secretary, Saadatu Yahya, whose delegation visited to discuss areas of collaboration for deepening digital/technical training and skills acquisition in Nasarawa State, commended the commission for the central role it has played in promoting digital awareness and skills across the country and pleaded that Nasarawa State should be 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.
“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. The ICT is, today, 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, especially because you are contiguous to our State,” Yahya said.
Other members of the delegation, including Senior Special Assistant to Nasarawa State Governor on Information and Communication Technology, Haruna Sani; 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 development.
