The Executive Secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Arc. Sonny Echono has emphasized the need for Nigeria to harness its natural resources and youthful population for economic and technological development of the country.
Arc. Echono spoke during the Startup Abuja Edutech Conference 2024 held in Abuja recently, where he received an award in recognition of his contributions to the education sector in Nigeria.
The TETFund boss who spoke as a Special Guest on the theme “The Future of Education Technology in Africa: Emerging Trends and Predictions” stated that progressing countries rely heavily on their youthful population and Nigeria must not be any different in activating its immense potentials leveraging on technology.
“We are endowed in natural resources, but possess the wrong indices on development, mortality rate among others. Nonetheless, there are positive signals we can leverage on. For example, we are the world largest producer of cassava, and only derive 5% when it comes to utilization. There are 23 products that can be extracted from cassava alone. We are also second in producing cocoa, but we have been lacking in adding value and processing it within Nigeria. Rather, we export it and import the refined products at higher cost.
“We have one of the highest rates of youthful population unlike other societies where they are struggling with an ageing population, which has led to numerous visa schemes to attract the best brains from Nigeria. We should not fight it, many countries in Asia promoted migration, they did not limit their citizens – as they are likely to return as assets to their native country later in future and add value at home. Nigeria must as well export, while retaining what is needed to run the nation,”
Speaking on the role of technology in moving Nigeria forward, the Executive Secretary predicted that the future of work in Africa, just like anywhere else will shift from hard labour, especially with the presence of robots and artificial intelligence. He said Nigeria must leverage on educational technology in breeding intellectual, innovative and creative individuals equipped with critical thinking and problem-solving mindset which are the only limits of Artificial Intelligence and robots already optimized for operations.
The Executive Secretary noted that TETFund had started promoting educational technology through its Tertiary Education Research Application and Services (TERAS) platform for tertiary educational institutions to digitalize the learning process, retain data and identity, with vast online repositories for research, and instructional delivery.
He also disclosed that the Fund was collaborating closely with relevant Ministries and Agencies to launch the “Earn-as-you-Learn programme” to train and prepare graduates for the workforce, while emphasizing that the future of Nigeria lies in the number of people it trains via educational technology.
