Python Nigeria community to raise army of AI developers in Nigeria

Python Nigeria community has pledged to raise an army of artificial intelligent developers in the country through training of young Nigeria in the use of python programming language.

Pius Okigbo Jr, chairperson of the community, said that artificial intelligent is the new frontier for Nigeria and developing countries to play in the 4th industrial revolution.

He pledged to use his wealth of experience in the software industry to deepen the knowledge and understanding of how to use python software to deliver top grade services in the country and ultimately for the benefit of our young people.

“I will ensure that we have some sort of interface where we can share our advancement and reach within the community and see how best we can propagate the goals and objectives we think we can gain by driving the use python in our software community,” he noted.

Kelvin Oyanna, immediate past chairperson, Python Nigeria Community, explained that the community is basically building people to develop skills and expertise in python programming language to solve problems.

“When young people are armed with skills they are able to use it to build technology tools to solve problems in finance, infrastructure, and agriculture and build solutions to solve our Nigerian problems.

“We are really looking for people who have no skills, no experience at all to come on board, for us to confidently say we gave them the platform to develop the skills and expertise they need in their job or building of business around technology.

Whichever level of qualification you are? We are willing through our various initiatives like meet-ups and training to upkeep and train people to develop their expertise to be able to become better in their job or build businesses around whatever technology they want to build.

“We play the role of talent developer. We develop people with the expertise to enable them solve problems in their various work places, jobs or start-ups and monetize it. We have been able to train over 55 persons in the use python programming.

Python Nigeria is a not- for- profit organisation as such doesn’t charge people to train them. To achieve this training we collaborate with agencies that assist to fund the training.

Dr. Yele Okeremi, president, Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) said that Python is community of developers, you have to understand that there are certain things in life that the value that ascribe to them is derived from the community, how large the community is.

For example, how valuable is your telephone if you are the only one that has a telephone in Nigeria? It is valueless because the essence of phone is communication. The telephone becomes of more value as you are adding more people to the network, same with anything communications. Platform owners such as Microsoft, Apple, Google among others, what they do is to try as much as possible to get developers onto their platform, because when you bring developers, once you are able to lure developers developing using your platform then your platform becomes more valuable.

The same thing is happening with python, which is a development tool, they realized that the best thing is coming together so that nobody can kill them. They want to share experiences, challenges, fears and aspirations so that together they can make the platform a lot more acceptable to people and by so doing making it a lot more valuable. That is what the community is about and ISPON will continue to support all such communities; just as long as the community is being created to develop intellectual property which is good in Nigeria.