By Emmanuel Elebeke

The Director General Chief Executive of the National Board for Technology Incubation Centre, Dr. Mohammed Jibrin says the agency has succeeded in creating about 162,000 entrepreneurs in five years of its existence in the 27 Technology Incubation, TIC centres across the country.

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Dr. Jibrin disclosed this in an interview with Vanguard in Abuja. Out of this number, the DG stated that 6,000 people had been trained to date in each of the centre to create enterprises out of the entrepreneurial businesses in the country.

He said that the agency was established in 2005 to coordinate the activities of technology incubation in the country, with 10 centres at that time and since then has grown to 27 across the country, with five extension centres.

The target of the agency, he said has been to accelerate the economic development of the country and to ensure that most of the research results and innovations from these centres are converted into economic gains.

According to him, the agency, through the programme Links Talents, Technology, Capital and Know-how had equipped so many enterprises with requisite skills in order to accelerate the development of the industrial base of the country.

He explained that the refocus of NBTI is to groom undergraduates on possible means of converting their technology research and innovations into meal tickets before their graduation.

He further stated that about 800 research and development results have been so far incubated in the market, out of which, 500 have been researched.

He said the initiative was in line with the policy trust of NBTI which is to pursue the commercialization of research and development results for the creation of jobs, wealth as well as poverty reduction.

With 5, 560 wards in the country, he said plans had been put in place to enable them benefit from these R and D initiatives.

According to him, campaign of sensitization is going on to the extent that the state governments are now establishing new incubation centres and the private incubators are coming up as part of institution based technology centres.

He highlighted some of the numerous challenges facing business start-ups in Nigeria as power, capital, infrastructure and called for both government and private sector support to encourage the budding entrepreneurs.