IT NEWS NIGERIA:
The Kano Zonal Office of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) recently gave a concrete expression to the centrality of all-inclusive consultations as a theme for attaining sustainable development, when it organised a multi-stakeholder meeting with beneficiaries of Digital Access Programme (DAP) within its jurisdiction.
DAP is one of the four programmes that made up the School Support Programme (SSP) through which NCC provides equipment and devices to educational institutions to enable the students and their teachers to learn new digital skills to bridge the digital divide, enhance their studies, and enable them to qualitatively improve on their wellbeing by tapping into the knowledge economy that is oriented in the emergent digital culture.
In 2018, the NCC Kano Zonal Office undertook a visitation to many of the schools that benefited from DAP which involves the provision of an ICT laboratory equipped with computers that are connected to the Internet alongside one year Internet subscription. Each benefitting school also receive a power generating set from NCC.
Shuaibu Swade, the Controller Kano Zonal Office of NCC stated that the office found that most of the schools seem to have abandoned the facilities after the year long period during which NCC offers the beneficiaries free bandwidth. “This is the reason we are organising this multi-stakeholder meeting of 15 principals of benefiting secondary schools, representatives of Kano state SERVICOM, Kano State Secondary Management Board, community groups, Parent-Teachers Associations, as well as Old Boys or Girls unions of the schools involved, to reflect on how to reactivate the projects and ensure sustainable utilization of the projects with measurable outcomes. Swade stated and noted that the zonal office embarked on the visit to various schools in keeping with Commission’s determination to ensure that beneficiaries of all its projects maximize all the benefits derivable from such programmes and projects. All the participants at the meeting made very useful comments and observations, and they all thanked the NCC for the opportunity created to reflect on the projects and their sustainability.
