By Muhammad Jalal
The Director-General and Chief Executive Officer of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, CCIE, has challenged African governments and technology stakeholders to move beyond measuring digital progress by the number of people trained, insisting that the real test is how many can turn those skills into jobs, businesses and higher incomes.
Abdullahi made the call while speaking at a high-level panel on “Scaling Africa’s Digital Workforce”, held under the Digital Skills and Talent Session of “Nigeria at Scale: Building Digital Systems for Shared Prosperity,” on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA81).
The session brought together Abdullahi; Gabon’s Minister of ICT, H.E. Mark Doumba; and Oji Udezue, a product leader and investor who previously served as Chief Product Officer at Calendly and Typeform. The discussion was moderated by Joannes Paulus Yimbesalu, Founder of Nanaade and Africa Skills Alliance and Fellow of the Social Innovation + Change Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School.
At the centre of Abdullahi’s intervention was a warning that Africa risks producing large numbers of digitally trained young people without building the economic pathways needed to connect them with real opportunities.
“We have industrialised training; we have not yet industrialised the transition,” he said.
According to the NITDA chief, the difficult part begins after training, when young people must cross the gap separating certificates from employment, entrepreneurship and sustainable income.
He identified three major barriers standing between digital talent and economic opportunity.
The first is what he described as the “trust gate” — the difficulty employers face in determining whether a job seeker genuinely possesses the skills claimed on a certificate or CV.
The second is the “platform and connectivity gate,” which includes inadequate access to devices, affordable internet, dependable electricity and digital platforms capable of connecting skilled young people with opportunities.
The third is the “demand gate”, created by the widening gap between the number of young Africans entering the labour market and the number of formal jobs available.
Abdullahi said Nigeria is responding by treating digital transformation as an interconnected ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated training programmes.
He explained that NITDA, working with the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, is linking digital literacy, advanced technical training, connectivity, cloud infrastructure and job creation as components of a broader national digital transformation strategy.
One of the initiatives he cited was the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) programme, which has trained more than 143,000 fellows across three cohorts.
He also highlighted the Talent Registry, designed to help bridge the trust gap by connecting verified digital capabilities with employers and other opportunities.
But Abdullahi stressed that talent development cannot succeed without the infrastructure required to put those skills to work.
He pointed to Project BRIDGE, which is envisioned to deploy at least 90,000 kilometres of open-access fibre and expand Nigeria’s national backbone to approximately 125,000 kilometres, with the ultimate goal of reaching all 774 local government areas.
The initiative, he explained, is expected to improve connectivity for schools, healthcare facilities, government offices and communities, particularly outside Nigeria’s major urban centres.
This, he said, would help ensure that digital talent developed in smaller towns and rural communities is not excluded from the opportunities created by the digital economy.
The NITDA DG also drew a distinction between digital literacy and digital employability, arguing that both are necessary but serve different purposes.
Through NITDA’s Strategic Roadmap and Action Plan (SRAP 2.0), basic digital literacy is aimed at equipping Nigerians with the foundational skills required to participate safely and confidently in an increasingly digital society.
Advanced programmes, on the other hand, are intended to prepare young people for specialised opportunities in areas including artificial intelligence and machine learning, data science, software development, cloud computing and cybersecurity.
However, Abdullahi said Africa’s digital workforce strategy must not be reduced to the search for conventional technology jobs.
He argued that digital transformation must also reach the millions of Africans whose livelihoods depend on trading, farming, transportation, mechanics, artisan work, food businesses and other forms of entrepreneurship.
For such workers, he said, the value of digital skills should be measured by practical economic outcomes.
That could mean helping a trader accept digital payments, enabling an artisan to market products through social media, helping a farmer connect with customers and suppliers, allowing a small business owner to maintain digital records or helping entrepreneurs use artificial intelligence to improve productivity.
He posed a fundamental question to policymakers and technology stakeholders:
“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?’”
Abdullahi ultimately called for greater investment in the often-overlooked transition between learning and earning.
He urged governments, development partners and private-sector players to invest not only in classrooms and training programmes but also in systems that verify skills, connect talent with employers and create pathways to first employment and 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.
For NITDA, the message emerging from the UNGA81 discussion is clear: the success of Africa’s digital transformation should not be judged merely by the number of people who complete training.
The bigger measure, Abdullahi argued, is whether those skills result in jobs, businesses, increased productivity, higher incomes and broader participation in the digital economy.
The challenge before Africa, therefore, is no longer simply how to train its digital workforce, but how to build the economic bridge that allows that workforce to earn from what it has learned.
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