NATIONAL Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA, has announced plans to sponsor 111 Post Graduate students under its newly expanded scholarship scheme.

The Acting Director General of the agency, Dr. Vincent Olatunji, said the scholarship would cover 74 students for Masters’ degrees and 37 students for Doctorate degrees in the area of Information and Communication Technology. According to him, the largesse is equally distributed between the 36 states and FCT for Masters and six geo-political zones for PhD.

Similarly, the agency has commenced the training of 370 Youth Corp members on Open Source Software Development across the 36 states of the country and the Federal Capital Territory. Olatunji said that the six-week IT empowerment and entrepreneurship scheme was targeted at developing and empowering graduate youth with IT requisite employability skills, and at the same time assisting and mentoring them to become successful entrepreneurs.

He said that training was a clear demonstration job creation capability and an attempt towards developing the requisite human capacity in the area of information technology for sustainable livelihood and national development. According to Olatunji, about 100 youths are currently benefitting from the empowerment programme in the FCT.

He stated that there were numerous other initiatives of NITDA in the area of capacity building. The training programme, carried out in partnership with private sector organizations has trained over 1200 youths in the last five months. One of the beneficiaries, a graduate from University of Nigeria Nsukka, Okafor Samuel, who designed an  e-commerce website, narrated his story: ‘‘As a microbiologist, I don’t have a background in computer science, but I was able to organise my own website.”