Grace Ashiru
Coursera, a global online learning platform, has partnered with Nigeria’s National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) to help the country transition to a digital economy.
This partnership was made official on Wednesday. The online learning platform will work with NITDA to give some learners access world-class educational content from top universities and industry leaders like Yale, Meta, Google, and IBM’s M.
The platform says it has helped over 1.3 million Nigerians and 107 million people worldwide improve their education. It also plans to train young unemployed Nigerians in high-demand tech jobs like data analysis, cybersecurity, product design, machine learning, and software engineering as demand for IT jobs continue to rise.
Coursera will assist the Nigerian government in boosting the technical capabilities of the country’s public sector as part of the agreement, marking the first collaboration of its sort in Nigeria.
The collaboration may also aid in combating high youth unemployment rates, which stood at 19.6% in 2021. Coursera and NITDA hope to reach 8,000 Nigerian students in the first year of the relationship.
Learners will have access to Coursera’s Professional Certificates portfolio. These certificates are designed to give learners the skills they need to pass an industry certification exam or start a career in a specific field, like IT support, within three months.
With the help of this partnership, the country’s education system, which has been plagued for a long time by problems like a lack of funding, poor infrastructure, insufficient teaching tools, and a lack of good teachers, will get better, which will help lower the country’s high unemployment rate.
