Yemisi Izuora
The Digital Bridge Institute, DBI, is planning a training session for about 2,000 primary and secondary school teachers.
The exercise is a follow up to the Advanced Digital Awareness Programme held for Tertiary Institutions (ADAPTI), recently.
The Administrator of the Institute, Dr. Ike Adinde, who disclosed this in a chat with journalists, stressed that the training programme is being extended to secondary schools under the initiative tagged Digital Awareness Programme (DAP) with funding provided by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
DBI is the capacity-building arm of the NCC which has the mandate to train Nigerians on emerging trends and rudiments of Information Communication Technology (ICT). Adinde said the schools will cut across all the six geographical zones of the federation.
He described ADAPTI as a shining example of what intervention from government can do. “The NCC has supported ADAPTI from its inception and so today the universities are enjoying our capacity building opportunities because there is funding coming from the NCC via the ADAPTI programme to the universities. As we speak ADAPTI has accounted for the training of over 50,000 Nigerian lecturers and non- lecturers across all tertiary institutions.
“This year we have extended the programme with the approval of the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Professor Umar Danbatta, to secondary schools, so we now have a second component of another version of ADAPTI which we call DAP (Digital Awareness Programme) which is an appreciation programme for secondary schools and this year we’re targeting over 2000 primary and secondary school teachers,” Adinde said.
The Administrator who is a strong advocate for increased funding for ICT training among African governments said capacity building should not be an option; “it is a choice that government and organisations just have to make because the more knowledgeable and more skilled your employees are, the better their performance and productivity at work, the better they’re able to contribute to organisational objectives and goals.”
The DAP programme targets pre-tertiary teachers and administrators of public schools for training in basic ICT, office productivity tools, Intranet and Internet, use of e-teaching and e-learning facilities at no cost to the participants to enable them with ICT skills to improve their learning, teaching and administration skills.