The plateau state government has established an ICT development agency with the mandate to develop ICT, as well as using it as a tool for social mobility in solving youth unemployment in the state.
Mr Daser David, Director General, Plateau State Information Technology Development Agency (PICTDA) disclosed this recently at the 10th West Africa Convergence Conference WACC 2019 which was held at Ikeja, Lagos.
The agency which is dubbed as ‘Silicon Plateau’ was also created to ensure that the day to day running’s of government is effectively done using IT tools.
David noted that Silicon Plateau would serve as a Nexus to all the IT hubs in the State.
According to him, “we have a lot of unemployed youths in the state. So the aim of this technology is actually to re-skill this young people and give them that top notch skill for them to be able to compete with anybody in the world.
“One part of the policy of the agency is to create jobs for Plateau Indigenes, instead of taking money out of plateau state, how do we bring money to plateau state but because of the crisis a lot of people find it difficult to come to Jos.
“So the ecosystem that we are trying to create is where people looking for developer talents, engineering talents, you already know where to go to and that is Jos, you can go and hire from Jos and bring them to Lagos, you can hire and take them anywhere you want to go.
“If you want them to work remotely, they can still be in Jos and working for you remotely.
“So that’s the ecosystem that we should be expecting to see in the next one or two years, where we will have massive developer talents across the state but that will be going side by side with us trying to reduce the cost of IT infrastructure, trying to support the entrepreneurship ecosystem, like having some kind of incentives of internet services to business support organization like the incubation hubs.
To achieve this, he revealed that they are taking with the Local Government Chairmen across the state to establish 17 innovation hubs in the 17 local government area to ensure job creation for the youth.
“70 per cent of the youth in Plateau are unemployable and it is a major problem.
“Most of these youth are still waiting for government to provide jobs for them.
“To reduce this issue the state government is trying to fund the creation of innovation hubs at the local government level to provide opportunities for graduates to train as software developers, more like re-skill them, give them a career so that they can now be placed in jobs, in tech space, there are a lot of opportunities for them.
“We want a situation whereby jobs can be outsourced to Jos and not vice versa.
He also noted that the state government would definitely partner with private innovation hubs to supervise the affairs of the hubs.
David said that the state was looking forward to a time here the youth in the state would be able to compete in terms of innovation across the country and around the world.
He added that his joy will be for Plateau state to become a foremost innovation hub, where people can find all sorts of tech talents within the next one or two years.
“To me, what I will call a win is for plateau state becoming innovation hub in Nigeria where you can find all sort of tech talents in the next one or two years.
“Once I guarantee that I have five thousand software developers living in Jos I’ve won.
“Once I’ve five to six thousand developers, I have built the biggest human capital more than any other state in Nigeria, it means that I’m able to inject so much money into plateau state.”