Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan announced that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will be incorporated into the National Education Curricular at primary school level.
Jonathan inaugurated the presidential committee on broadband, and said that children need to pe exposed to ICT. “We must therefore start exposing our children to ICTs to encourage in them familiarity with new technologies and the desire to develop software programmes and applications.”
He added that it is necessary to include ICT in the curricular if Nigeria wants to stay ahead in technology – which has seen a tremendous upsurge over the last couple of years. “It is important to start thinking of how to build a digital economy particularly in this era of the knowledge economy. The critical factor here is that we are in the middle of a digital revolution that has seen ICT transform the global economy.”
According to Abuja-based Leadership, “he pointed out that broadband has the potential to facilitate the creation of new industries and introduce significant efficiencies into existing ones, adding that education delivery, health care provision, energy management, public safety, government/citizen interaction and the overall organisation and dissemination of knowledge will also benefit meaningfully from it.”
With the announcement that ICT will be included in the curricular, Jonathan also added that Nigeria’s National ICT policy will aim to increase broadband penetration by five-fold by 2017.
Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor
