By Moses Nosike

Evidence has shown that industralised nations of the world embarked upon education empowerment. And this is the way forward for developing countries especially African continent. Considering this, however, contributing sectors of the Nigerian economy, SMEs, entrepreneurs, manufacturing, IT, Oil and Gas etc. have realised the need for education if there must be a sustainable development in Nigerian economy.

This was the push of the country’s most innovative telecommunications operator, Etisalat, partnering Thistle Praxis Consulting, during the last edition of the thought leadership series, Sustainable Conversations, organised by the latter.

With a notable team of discussants from various sectors including ICT, academia, business and government, discussing on the theme: Sustainable Development Goals: Fast-tracking targets through technology and education, the stage, no doubt, was insightful, creative as the discussants left no stone unturned proffering solutions on the nation’s potentials and enabling capacities for the achievement of the UN-backed 17-goal sustainable development agenda.

In 2000, the United Nations drew up a 15-year development agenda termed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which were designed to enable member nations streamline and deliver on critical needs with an overriding goal of bridging the gap between the developed nations and the developing nations as well as the under-developed ones in various areas that are critical to human life.

After fifteen years, the Millennium Development Goals were rested, and in their stead, a new development agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), came into effect in 2015 to pick up from where the MDGs left off, and cover even more ground.

According to the acting Regional Coordinator, Africa, UN Millennium Campaign/SDGs Action Campaign, Hillary Ogbonna, “This paradigm shift became necessary due to the inadequacies and the ultimate failure of the MDGs to provide answers to certain critical development needs.”

“The MDGs were proclamations, minimalist in nature, and did not talk about how they would be implemented. We have seen a lot of changes in the world that the MDGs forged, however there are critical areas they left unaddressed. Chief among these are environmental degradation and climate change. There should be an overarching development agenda that should combat this. The world needed to bring up another development agenda that would build on the successes of the MDGs, whose timeline ran out in 2015, learn from its lessons and broaden the stakeholders that are involved in development, which the MDGs did not recognise,” he said.

Interestingly, Etisalat Nigeria, has given heed to this clarion call well ahead of other well-meaning stakeholders with first-of-its-kind expansive interventions that cut across all levels of education. Notable among these is the Etisalat Telecommunications Engineering Postgraduate Program (ETEPP) which it runs in partnership with Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria; Plymouth University United Kingdom and the Etisalat Academy in the United Arab Emirates. It is the first-ever postgraduate degree course in Telecommunications Engineering in West Africa.

Etisalat Nigeria’s Vice President, Regulatory and Corporate Affairs, Ibrahim Dikko, while speaking on the company’s commitment to fast-tracking development using technology, said the idea behind education providing a basic foundation for development readily resonates with the company as it has shown through various intervention efforts in the education sector.

“Education is the bedrock of development; it opens doors in the minds of the citizenry and that determines the rate and extent to which the nation can evolve. When we started operations in 2008, we realized that in our Universities were the core engineering courses, but no telecommunications engineering. In this 21st century, there is no way we can go forward and build capacity if we did not try and address that. So we started the Etisalat Telecommunications Engineering Post-Graduate Programme which we instituted in partnership with ABU, Zaria, the Etisalat Academy, UAE and Plymouth University, UK for technical expertise. We are also training some lecturers at PhD level so there can be capacity for knowledge sharing,” he said.

Etisalat’s modelled examples of partnership for sustainable development transcend education; they also cover such sectors as environment and health where it has forged a reputation for innovative development of ICT solutions to infant and maternal health challenges.

As the nation, its leadership and citizenry embarks on the tasking but hugely rewarding work of achieving all-round development, it is gratifying to know that Etisalat Nigeria and its partners have undertaken to chart the course use of the nation’s impactful delivery on the SDGs.

The new development agenda called, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) consists of 17 goals, 169 targets and about 450 indicators. These goals include strategic focus on infrastructure, energy, security, inequality, hunger, etc. with an open provision for participation by every segment of the society. Unlike the MDGs, it has also recognised and articulated the drivers of development like equal opportunity, peace, security, access to justice, etc, as well as the means of implementation and guidelines on how they would be implemented including financing, partnerships, technology transfer, innovations, etc.

The SDGs agenda also identified education, and partnership with key segments of the society as part of the solution-oriented approach to the myriad of identified development challenges.