The Cohort 2 Coursera Programme organized by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), has seen ten Nigerians who are classified as outstanding learners get laptops.
The laptops were presented to the ten outstanding learners, who are also the first to complete their professional certification by Dr. Amina Sambo-Magaji, the representative of the Director-General of NITDA, Mal. Kashifu Inuwa.
Dr Amina Sambo-Magaji, the Director-General congratulated the beneficiaries and commended them for surpassing expectations, creatively utilising the knowledge gained during the training and performing excellently.
According to her, the promise of giving laptops as prizes to winners was to encourage healthy competition among the trainees for them to think outside the box and perform optimally in their respective areas of interest, especially as the outcome of the first batch of trainees wasn’t quite satisfactory, expressed satisfaction at the innovative ideas birthed by the learners.
“After our first batch, we realised that the competition rate was not very encouraging, so, we looked at different options, and brainstormed on the possible best option to increase the competition rate and one of them was the concept of giving the laptops which eventually paid off as there were timely and tangible results gotten from learners.”
The NITDA Boss reiterated the fact that the youthful population of the country remains one of the key competitive advantages over other nations and as such should be explored and exploited to achieve the Federal Government’s quest of making Nigeria the global talent hub.
The NITDA-Cousera partnership is aimed at achieving some key objectives which include: empowering twenty-four thousand (24,000) Nigerians with digital & developer skills in 3 years, empowering Nigerian citizens with job-ready skills and creating a large pool of IT talents for the local and global markets, fostering innovation and supporting start-ups with IT knowledge & skills needed to build real-life solutions.
It is worth to also mention that since the start of Cohort 2 in June 2023, learners have spent over 10,000 hours learning on Coursera every month as July witnessed over 20,000 learning hours.
So far, 12,664 Courses have been completed by the learners since the programme started.
