From Blessing Olaifa, Abuja
The Federal Government has inaugurated a 29-member Advisory Board of the Abuja Team for Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Programme (REAP), promoted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy Dr Isa Ali Pantami, who inaugurated the Board at the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Annex, Mbora, Abuja, urged the members to hit the ground runing by ensuring that Abuja and its environs become innovations hubs like Lagos State as soon as possible.
Pantami said the administration is thinking ahead on how to turn youths into job providers in the near future and not job seekers after graduation from universities.
He said: “This year, over 1.9 million Nigerians applied for JAMB and a few days ago, I asked the Head of Service about the total number of our civil servants, she said they are about 77,000. So imaging if 1 000, 000 students get admission into the universities and maybe about 800,000 graduate in just few years, where do we engage them?’’
“So there is urgent need for us to think ahead and leverage the opportunities available in Information and Communications Technology sector and the emerging Digital ecosystem to provide the the platforms for the transformation of the entire economy in a way that our youths will have the skills to become employers of labour and not employees in the near future”, Dr Pantami said.
” I must emphasise, at this point, that while the focus of this is officially Abuja, the aims of this project transcend the FCT; and this is being done for Nigeria as a whole.
The learnings and principles applied through REAP, are transferable to any town, city, state or region of this dear nation of ours, ” Dr Pantami said.
The minister who gave the backgrounds of the collaboration with the MIT, said “Abuja is joined in REAP’s 7th Cohort by teams from regions in Denmark, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan (ROC)”, adding that the focus would be on agriculture, industry, and the environment among others.
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“The Lagos team had colleagues from Canada, Iceland, Peru, Spain and the UAE; attesting to the importance that the world places on creating innovation driven ecosystems, and our aspiration to operate at global best standards,” he said.
According to Dr Pantami the main purpose of the programme is to adopt, and adapt, MIT’s proven frameworks on accelerating innovation to create localized strategies for developing and sustaining enterprises driven by innovation (IDEs).
” The march towards a Digital Economy, which I currently oversee will depend on harnessing scaled innovation towards fulfilling the 8 pillars, which our national strategy is built upon,” he said
In explainng the benefits of the programme, the Minister said during a workshop in the United States, the team was introduced to a programme in the Boston area called MASSChallenge.
“A clear example of the REAP principles of stakeholder collaboration, this programme over a five-year period has attracted, incubated and commercialised over 2,400 new innovative startup companies that attracted over $6billion in funding, generated over $3billion in revenues with sustained growth; and employed over 157,000 people; all located in the Greater Boston area.
“And the project has replicated in other US cities, like Austin and other countries as well. These are the sorts of numbers we would love to see emerge in various pockets around the country, to realise that we are tackling the endless socio-economic complaints that bombard us daily; that translate into gross dependency – and it is SDG compliant too, ” Pantami said.
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