Nigeria’s tech regulator (NITDA) is teaming up with a decades-old association of female educators to push digital skills, entrepreneurship, and STEM training into classrooms across the country, with mentorship expected to reach the girls those educators teach.
The Partnership Takes Shape
The National Information Technology Development Agency is partnering with the National Association of Women in Colleges of Education to launch a nationwide programme focused on digital literacy, entrepreneurship and STEM training for female educators and the students they support. The proposed collaboration was discussed during a meeting at NITDA’s headquarters, where the association’s North-West Zonal Coordinator, Zainab Inuwa Adamu, invited NITDA Director-General Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi to serve as patron of the association’s forthcoming national conference.
Adamu used the meeting to lay out the association’s track record. She highlighted the association’s more than three-decade history of supporting female educators and empowering young girls through practical vocational training, including tailoring, knitting and soap-making. The proposed partnership with NITDA is meant to extend that legacy from vocational skills into digital and technology training.
What The Training Will Cover
Abdullahi welcomed the invitation, stressing that lasting impact requires sustained capacity building rather than one-off interventions. He proposed developing digital literacy and IT skills programmes for members of the association, with a nationwide rollout potentially launched at the upcoming conference.
The curriculum under discussion goes beyond basic digital literacy. The planned training would also cover digital marketing, business planning and entrepreneurship to help women strengthen their economic ventures. NITDA has committed to providing digital tools and learning materials and has invited the association to participate in the agency’s Digital Nigeria Conference 2026.
Mentorship Extends To Students
The initiative is expected to extend beyond educators, with mentorship opportunities cascading to the girls they support. That structure mirrors NITDA’s broader approach elsewhere: reach teachers first, then rely on them to pass digital skills down to students, extending the agency’s limited direct capacity through the educators already embedded in classrooms nationwide.
Part Of A Wider Gender-Inclusive Push
As part of NITDA’s gender-inclusive innovation agenda, Abdullahi also emphasised the need to expand the STEM pipeline and encourage more young women to pursue careers in artificial intelligence, data science and other technology fields.
The partnership with the women educators’ association is not an isolated move. NITDA has been running several parallel efforts aimed at closing Nigeria’s gender digital divide over the past few months, including a partnership with the Nigeria Association of Women Journalists to advance women’s digital inclusion, where the agency said at least 40 percent of its initiatives are deliberately designed to benefit women under its National Gender Inclusive Strategy. The agency has also run large-scale teacher training efforts more broadly, training 3,600 teachers and master trainers through its Digital Literacy for All initiative, in partnership with Nigeria’s basic and secondary education commissions.
