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Plateau State establishes agency for ICT development

By Ugo Onwuaso
05 April 2019   |   2:59 am
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…

Governor Simon Lalong of Plateau State.

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.

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