To boost Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in schools, Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Sonny Echono, said the commission had disbursed about N27.6 billion on ICT support intervention programmes in the last seven years.

Echono, in his lecture at the 26th convocation of Lagos State University (LASU), said the agency had set up a National Knowledge Bank where theses of beneficiaries of its programmes would be stored in digital form for easy accessibility from anywhere in the world.

Echono pointed out that the use of ICT is not limited to payment of fees, as it could help access education. He said: “Graduates now need a mix of skills more than in the past. Incidentally, most of the skills are hinged on digital literacy. Some companies have left the country because of lack of people with basic skills required in their sectors despite the high rate of unemployment in the country.

“To drive this home, 87 per cent of McKinsey Global Survey respondents said they experienced such skills gap too. Challenges of higher education are similar across other nations. We must review our curriculum and ensure we give people technical knowledge; we should also give them real life business practices to guide them in life.”

According to the TETFund chief, there is an urgent need to reform the nation’s education system, and review its curriculum periodically, as we experience changes in the world daily.

Already, Echono said, TETFund has developed a digital literacy roadmap to accommodate current developments. He said the organisation tripled its allocations to ICT projects in the last few years, a development that has led to over 19,000 people being trained in digital literacy across institutions.

The TETFund chief stated that digitisation of teaching and learning would reduce cost, increase access to education and improve efficiency, among others.

Executive Secretary of National Universities Commission (NUC), Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, said two revolutions started globally about two decades ago and were changing the way people live.

Rasheed said the commission had done a comprehensive review of the curriculum in Nigerian universities.