For years, Nigeria has tried to make a head way in global information technology, especially playing a role in the emerging electronic market presently dominated by the Western nations and a few developing nations like China, India and Brazil.
With a huge population, the country knows it cannot compete with the established nations without a very good human capital platform.
Having missed the industrial age, it hopes to capitalise on its huge population to compete in the growing software market. However, Nigerian youths have faced obstacles on many fronts in their desire to become software developers.
These obstacles include lack of encouragement in purchasing local software from the public and private sectors, lack of support in investing in their ideas and a difficult environment competing with foreign software.
With the right training and capacity building,? youths in Nigeria will not only be able to develop the necessary skills that will enable them innovate and create software applications to be reckoned with, but it will also enable them establish IT businesses that can? thrive and make a difference.
So last week in Lagos, technology giants like Microsoft, Google, IBM, CNBC Africa and Visafone, supported by the Ministry of Communications Technology, came under the platform of Youth Empowerment and ICT Foundation to harness the best brains among Nigerian youths for software? exports through the first Android Developer Conference.
It was not strange that over 2,500 youths gathered to learn how to be software developers and what steps they need to harness their skills into becoming the next generation of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergs, founders of Microsoft and Facebook respectively, who today have changed the world with their technological inventions.
Mr. Jim Ovia, Chairman, Youth Empowerment and ICT Foundation , said the Android Developer Conference was aimed at identifying at least 350 Nigerian software developers whose applications can compete in the global software marketplace and positioning.
Ovia, founder of Visafone and co-founder, Zenith Bank Plc., who is passionate about the Nigerian youths, has his eyes set on grooming young software entrepreneurs that will rule the world with the applications. His target is to get 350 software developers, with the best 10 getting N5 million each from the Jim Ovia Foundation, to package their applications to be commercially viable and exportable.
Miss Nmachi Jidenma, Project Coordinator, Google Africa, said that there were? lots of opportunities in software applications development, noting that Google was in Nigeria to increase sustainable internet ecosystem through a long term approach? by working with youths to build? future applications and future software entrepreneurs.?
According to Mrs. Omobola Johnson, Minister of Communications Technology, who declared the event open, the Nigerian youths? are dynamic, hardworking, entrepreneurial in nature and hungry for technology, and if given the chance and the enabling environment to develop their inherent skills, will not only thrive, but will make Nigerians and Africans proud.
“We have seen the results of what their exposure to ICT can do with the remarkable achievement of some of our youths who have excelled in several local and international software competitions,” she said. Developing a vibrant software industry does more than reduce this heavy import bill, it creates jobs especially in the young population, she said.
To make Nigeria, a software exporter, our government and stakeholders in the software industry need to ensure that the software being developed is fit for the purpose, relevant, of high quality, properly documented and meets up-to-date software development skills – including solution architecting and testing.?
There is need to facilitate the process of moving from innovation and ideas? to business viability and commercialisation – in other words ensuring that ideas for software applications are viable and bankable; reducing the exploitation of software developers through the enforcement of intellectual property rights and copyrights? and finally, providing sources of funding that are more appropriate for software enterprenuers, that is, venture capitalists and not the traditional collateral-based lending.