The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has urged Nasarawa State Scholarship Board (NSSB) to support the NCC in creating awareness about the intervention projects of the Commission concerning research and digital literacy in order to provide more opportunities for the citizenry.
The commission’s Director of Digital Economy, Dr. Augustine Nwaulune, gave this charge while hosting the NSSB delegation on behalf of the Executive Vice Chairman of the Commission, Prof. Umar Danbatta, during the team’s visit to the commission’s headquarters in Abuja.
He recalled that Nasarawa State was one of the beneficiaries of NCC’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) intervention projects.
The director listed some of the projects as including the Digital Awareness Programme (DAP) for secondary schools, the Advanced Digital Appreciation Programme for Tertiary Institutions (ADAPTI), the Wireless Cloud, as well as the E-Health programme.
He said: “While we don’t give scholarship to students, the NCC has continued to give research grants to lecturers and students in the universities, and provided additional opportunities including sponsoring competitions involving students, as well as endowing professorial chairs in universities across the country. In the last seven years, the financial value of the endowments and grants is more than N500 million.
“Therefore, I will appeal to NSSB to create awareness about these initiatives of the NCC among stakeholders in the academia, particularly the research grants to enable stakeholders to leverage such opportunities offered by the Commission to scholars interested in carrying out telecommunications-based research,” Nwaulune added.
He maintained the NCC had been upbeat in ensuring implementation of the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy (NDEPS), 2020-2030, in which one of its eight pillars, rests on digital literacy, while the Digital Economy Department has been set up and equipped by the Commission with the human resources required to coordinate its programmes in concrete terms.
In her remarks, the NSSB’s Executive Secretary, Hajia Saadatu Yahya, who led the delegation, said the visit was made to the commission to discuss areas of collaboration for deepening digital/technical training and skills acquisition in Nasarawa State.
Yahya commended the Commission for the central role it had been playing in promoting digital awareness and skills across the country, and pleaded that Nasarawa State should be given more opportunities to benefit from NCC’s social investments and other digital economy-focused interventions, being the closest State to the Federal Capital Territory, the base of the Commission.
She said: “The purpose of our visit is to seek collaboration with the NCC in whatever ways possible, especially in the areas of scholarship, and ICT skills and literacy for our people.
“The ICT is, today, the engine room of global economy and we do not want to lag in this new digital order, hence, our decision to seek collaboration with organisations in the ICT space such as yours to work which, especially because you are contiguous to our State”, the Executive Secretary added.
