Anambra, Cisco Set Up 21 Cisco Academies

Anambra State government and Cisco Systems, leading supplier of networking equipment and network management for the Internet have teamed up to set up Cisco Academies in all the 21 Local Government Areas of the state.  
The initiative, the first in the country would have the Academies deliver IT essentials, which is the introductory part and CCNA – a curriculum which teaches networking based on application and technology.
Mr. Julius Ayaktuba of the Cisco Academy, “the Anambra State government is setting up the labs from scratch and is going to buy the computers as well as provide laboratories. In terms of the total cost of setting up the Academies, Cisco takes charge of 84per cent while the State provides 16 per cent.”
The courses are done online, and the great challenge is the problems of connectivity and electricity in the country, said Ayaktuba. “Because of bandwidth problems here, we have file savers where the curriculum can be downloaded and then used on the Academies’ local area network. So, the students do not need to be connected to the Internet at the time they are studying. But then, every assessment has to be done online, so you must connect to the Internet, which is the global standard.”
The Cisco Networking Academy started under a United Nations-Cisco initiative as one of the means to achieving the millennium development goals (MDGs); and was inaugurated in Nigeria in 2004. Cisco hopes to establish the Academy in all the countries of the world within a short time.