The Director-General/Chief Executive Officer of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, CCIE, has called for a shift in Africa’s digital workforce strategy from simply training people to ensuring that digital skills translate into jobs, businesses, higher productivity and improved livelihoods.
Abdullahi made the call while participating in a high-level panel session titled “Scaling Africa’s Digital Workforce” under the Digital Skills and Talent Session of “Nigeria at Scale: Building Digital Systems for Shared Prosperity,” held on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA81).
The NITDA chief, who joined Gabon’s Minister of ICT, H.E. Mark Doumba, and Oji Udezue, Product Leader and Investor and former Chief Product Officer at Calendly and Typeform, said Africa had made significant progress in expanding digital skills training but had yet to adequately address the transition from training to productive work.
“We have industrialised training; we have not yet industrialised the transition,” Abdullahi said.
He identified three major barriers confronting young people as they move from digital skills acquisition to employment and enterprise: the trust gap, where employers struggle to verify candidates’ capabilities; the platform and connectivity gap, caused by limited access to devices, affordable connectivity, reliable electricity and opportunities; and the demand gap, where the number of people entering the labour market exceeds available formal jobs.
Abdullahi said Nigeria was responding by linking digital literacy, advanced technical skills, connectivity, cloud infrastructure and job creation as components of a coordinated digital transformation agenda.
He cited the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) programme, which has trained more than 143,000 fellows across three cohorts, as well as the Talent Registry designed to connect verified digital skills with employers.
The NITDA DG also highlighted Project BRIDGE, which is envisioned to deploy at least 90,000 kilometres of open-access fibre and expand Nigeria’s national backbone to about 125,000 kilometres, with coverage extending to all 774 Local Government Areas.
According to him, the initiative is expected to improve connectivity for thousands of schools, healthcare facilities and local government offices, while enabling digitally skilled Nigerians outside major urban centres to participate more effectively in the digital economy.
Abdullahi further distinguished between digital literacy and digital employability, explaining that the former provides citizens with foundational capabilities to participate safely and confidently in the digital economy, while advanced initiatives such as 3MTT equip young Nigerians with specialised skills in artificial intelligence and machine learning, data science, software development, cloud computing and cybersecurity.
He stressed, however, that Africa’s digital workforce strategy should not focus exclusively on formal technology jobs, noting that digital inclusion must also cover traders, artisans, farmers, mechanics, transport operators, food vendors and other entrepreneurs.
For these groups, he said, digital skills should translate into practical capabilities such as using smartphones productively, accepting digital payments, marketing products through social media, finding customers and suppliers, keeping digital records, protecting against fraud, accessing digital services and deploying artificial intelligence tools to improve productivity.
“The question is not, ‘Can this person get a technology job?’ It is, ‘Can technology help this person earn more, reduce costs, reach more customers and run a better business?’” he said.
Abdullahi urged policymakers, development partners and ecosystem leaders to pay greater attention to the transition between learning and earning, stressing that investment should extend beyond classrooms to the mechanisms that connect trained people with verifiable credentials and their first paid opportunities.
“Fund the corridor, not another classroom, verifiable credentials and first-paid-work placement, because Africa’s young people are stuck in the gap between the certificate and the paycheck,” he said.
He maintained that the ultimate measure of Nigeria’s digital skills investments should not be the number of people trained alone, but the extent to which digital capabilities result in jobs, enterprise growth, increased productivity, higher incomes and meaningful participation in the digital economy.
The emphasis on converting skills into productive outcomes aligns with broader evidence that Africa continues to face significant gaps between digital-skills supply and labour-market demand, alongside persistent connectivity constraints.
