NITDA OPENS APPLICATION FOR COHORT 3 OF COURSERA PROFESSIONAL COURSES

By Jeffrey Adaralegbe
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The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), in collaboration with Coursera, is inviting interested Nigerians to apply for the Cohort 3 of Coursera courses, in keeping with the Agency’s goal of implementing President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda to create one million digital jobs in the information technology sector.

Recall that NITDA and Coursera on October 19, 2022 launched a partnership to help combat high rates of youth unemployment, which stood at 19.6% in 2021, with both parties intend to train 8000 Nigerian learners annually in a cohort of 4000 learners each for the total of 24,000 in 3 years.

World-class educational materials from prestigious universities and business titans, such as Yale, Meta, Google, and IBM, are made available to NITDA’s chosen learners via Coursera. Coursera will support the Nigerian government in improving the technical capabilities of the country’s youths and develop Information Technology talent.

The collaboration is Coursera’s first government partnership in Nigeria.
Partnering with Coursera will give Nigerian learners access to Coursera’s Professional Certificates portfolio, which are designed to empower learners to gain the skills necessary to pass an industry certification exam or launch a career in a specific field, such as IT support within three months.

Coursera’s 32 Professional Certificates are explicitly designed to facilitate entry into high-growth careers, including Data Analytics (Google), Social Media Marketing (Meta), and Software Developer (IBM). These roles are due to enhance an increasing share of the Nigerian labour market, which expects 3 million digital jobs to be created in the next four years.

Traction: During the first year of the collaboration, 8000 Learners were graduated from Cohorts 1 (4000) and 2 (4000). Beneficiaries range from students, Government workers, entrepreneurs and academics. In the 2 Cohorts, there were 43,745 enrollments in different courses with learners completing 16,374 courses which indicates that each learner enrolled an average of five courses.

The distribution of skills developed based on 3 domains are Computer science (31.83%), Business (35.73%) and Data Science (32.44%). The feedback from learners with an average rating of 4.8/5.0 signifies Nigerians enthusiasm in digital up-skilling on the Coursera Platform.