Gender equality to improve Nigeria’s GDP in 2025- NITDA

The National Information Technology Development Agency said that gender equality in the digital space could increase the Gross Domestic Product of the country by over 50 per cent.

The Director-General NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa said this on Friday at the closing ceremony of its ‘Fasaha Gina Mata, Gina Al-Umma’, digital skills programme in Abuja, in collaboration with World Bank and Natview Technology.

According to the NITDA boss, Fasaha Gina Mata Gina Al-Umma is a digital skills training programme to equip young women with the relevant skills they need to succeed in the digital world.

However, the four-day programme was held as part of the activities of the agency to celebrate International Women’s Day.

Speaking further, Inuwa recalled research by Mckinsey Global Institute which stated that placing women together with their male counterparts would increase the global GDP to about 18 trillion USD in 2025.

He said, “The research was narrowed to some countries which included Nigeria and it said that if we can achieve gender equality, we can add to the Nigerian GDP 299 billion by 2025.

“Within our own mandate, implementation of the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy, we are working on so many initiatives.

“One of them is the National Digital Skills Strategy, which the World bank has keyed into as one of the implementation partners.

“Under that strategy, we want to achieve 95 per cent digital literacy, we want to position Nigeria to become a global talent factory,” he said.

The NITDA DG added that looking at the global talent factory and according to research by Korn Ferry, a global organisational consulting firm, by 2030 there would be an 85 million talent deficit globally, adding that the deficit would result in 8.5 trillion USD unrealised annual revenue.

Inuwa added that deploying the Gig economy strategy which he explained as leveraging the power of information technology to work remotely, do freelance work could help the country position for revenue globally, stressing that with the Gig economy and having skills like content creation, digital marketing could help one use digital platforms to promote their businesses.

“If Nigeria can position itself, we can be part of this, we can have Nigeria be part of the Gig economy and working remotely.

“We can be part of the global value chain working remotely from Nigeria for European countries, the US companies, Asian companies and programmes like this will help us achieve that,’’ Inuwa said.

In addition, the DG stated that they were initiating programmes that were women based to encourage more female participation and digital literacy among women.

He, however, disclosed that from November 2022 to date, the NITDA had trained 226,000 young Nigerians on various digital skills but women represented only 28 per cent of the figure, stressing that the idea was to achieve 95 per cent digital literacy by 2030 which was kick-started with the Gina Mata programme to train 800 young women in the pilot programme.

Speaking also, the Chief Executive Officer of Natview Technology, Mr Nuradeen Maidoki said Fasaha Gina Mata, Gina Al-umma was translated as Building Women, Empowering Communities, adding that they intended to create a chain of highly skilled female technologists who could contribute to innovation and growth in Nigeria’s technology industry.

“We believe that by empowering young women with digital skills, we can create a more inclusive and diverse technology industry that reflects the richness and diversity of our society,’’ he said.

Maidoki added that the additional 600 young women would be trained from Borno, Gombe, Kano and Zamfara.