The Federal Ministry of Education and a global software company, CISCO, have concluded arrangement to strengthen the skills of 20,000 Nigerian graduates towards making them employable.
Under the arrangement that was approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC) yesterday, Cisco that has about 10,000 academies around the world, will take N3.7 billion or 84 per cent of the total cost of N4.3 billion while the Federal Government will take the remaining N684 million or 16 per cent.
The Minister of Education, Mrs. Obiageli Ezekwesili, who stated this while briefing State House Correspondents after the weekly FEC, said that the number of Nigerians billed for the training was arrived at after an online survey of graduates from tertiary institutions over a 10-year period during which 29,000 graduates responded.
While describing what she termed as the unfortunate “warehousing syndrome of Nigerian graduates”, she added that out of the 29,000 respondents, over 60 per cent were found to be unemployed and underemployed.
The Minister of Education who said that a lot of countries have relied on CISCO to train their graduates, stated that “in our own case, we found out that when people talk about the new economy they refer to knowledge economy. One of the things that happen in knowledge economy is that sectors are now upgrading their knowledge base, whether it is the oil and gas or the communications sectors. It is all about capability and the capacity that you have in ICT. So in reskilling our glut of graduates towards employability, we needed to take them through a transformation and that transformation is coming in the form of partnership between the Federal Ministry of Education and CISCO”.
Giving insight into the cost implication of the partnership between the Federal Gove-rnment and CISCO, Ezekwesili stated that “this would have been costing a significant amount if we had decided to fund it alone.
But under the partnership, CISCO will take 84 per cent of the cost and the Federal Government will take 16 per cent. For a programme that would be costing N4.3 billion, CISCO will absorb N3.7 billion and the Federal Gover-nment will be contributing N684 billion.
At the end of the exercise which will span 6 months, 12 months and 15 months certification, you can be certain that a good number of those graduates will be transformed”.
She added that “CISCO, basically is a global company known for networking and has been running CISCO Academy all over the world. Currently, there are 10,000 of such academies around the world. They do it as part of their social and corporate responsibility.
They require the country concerned to contribute into the training. We have entered into a strategic partnership with CISCO in which CISCO and Federal Ministry of Education will take 20, 000 of the 29,000 graduates surveyed. These graduates have clearly shown that they are going nowhere and CISCO is going to run an IT re-certification Programme which is of international academic standard. Many people who have gone through this programme go the internet and get jobs. So it is universal certification”.


Source This Day http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=74802

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