ABUJA, (Sundiata Post) – Nigeria Communication Commission (NCC) on Tuesday donated some Information Communication Technology (ICT) equipment to the Nigerian Society of Computer’s ‘For School Initiative’, Abuja chapter, while expressing commitment to its corporate social responsibility to promote computer literacy in schools.
ICT equipment include 60-monitors, 35-CPU, 30-printers, 50-UPS and 15-laptops, which were previously used by the commission.
Presenting the equipment at the NCC Corporate Headquarter in Abuja, Prof Umar Garba Danbatta, Executive Vice Chairman, NCC, represented by Mr Tony Ojobo, Director Public Affair NCC, said the commission will continue to support NSC as a whole.
He said, NCC been the regulator of ICT sector, ”take the issue of computer education very necessary that’s why on our program we have certain platform through which we deliver computers to schools and tertiary institutions.
“We have what we call the Digital Awareness Programs, through which computers are delivered to secondary schools with internet facilities for a period of one year, we have the advance digital awareness program where NCC deliver to polytechnics and Universities laptops computers with wireless internet that enables the university community connect to the internet and have access to this in their libraries.
“We are also interested in the young once who will key into these industries, who may become software developers in future, so it part of our corporate social responsibility programs. The commission has tried to see how it can support local developers of applications.
“Some of the our applications are designed by local developers, that indeed help to encourage local manufacturers and developer of software’s , industry contributed about 10% to GDP during the first quarter of last year, we believe lot more can happen as lots of young graduates begin to get into the industry.”
Chairman Nigeria Society of Computer, Abuja Chapter, Mr. Rex Abitogun, said the computer school project “is an initiative of NSC Abuja chapter to promote digital literacy and compliment government effort in addressing ICT gap that exit in some public school especially in the rural areas of Federal Capital Territory.”
He said, “The project seeks to partner with public and private organisations within the FCT by getting them to donate their computer systems while we on our part will get our members to volunteer their skills and knowledge in preparing it for upward donation to identified schools as well as buildi8ng capacity of their teachers through a train the trainers program.
“We believe this initiative will help in preparing students in the rural community for the challenges and opportunities abound in the digital space.
“We are aware of different intervention project undertaken by the commission to address the digital literacy gap including the Digital Awareness Programme (DAP) target towards the growing youth population in the country.”
Mr. Abraham Oshidami, Head of ICT, noted that the systems delivered by the commission had been used by the commission for a specific period but not outdated.
“When we remove the hard disk, we replace them with new ones before giving them out,” he said.
