Training Of Ogudu Youth Exposes Nigeria’s Digital Challenges

Simon Ateba/Lagos

After a five-day digital training of youth in the worst part of Ogudu Area of Lagos last week, Joe Femi-Dagunro‎ realised that the digital opportunities in Nigeria were huge but the challenges were as many.

He had in 2004, along with wife and friends, set up  ‎the ‘Joe Femi-Danguro Education Project’ that has now metamorphosed into ‎’Ogudu Empowerment Experience’‎ to give back to his community the knowledge and wealth of experience he had acquired travelling the world for several decades.

“I have been seeing development around the world and how groups and individuals have been helping their communities and I wanted to help my community, I wanted to give back,” said Femi-Dagunro, Former Vice President for Africa Riedel Glassworks Austria.

“This is why ‎I started doing this as Joe Femi-Dagunro Initiative to set up the Ogudu Empowerment Experience and give back to my community what I have seen or acquired around the world,” he said in an interview on 20 December.

Ten years ago in 2004 when he launched the Femi-Dagunro Education Project  that has metamorphosed into the Ogudu Empowerment Experience, he would bring friends from Germany to train Ogudu residents on a range of subjects, including digital, media, photography and video recording.

“We would come from Germany with all my friends and train people around here twice a year, three weeks each time,” he said.

This year, the Ogudu Empowerment Initiative was able to link Maryland Comprehensive School with two other schools in Germany.

“They were corresponding, they were exchanging ideas. It was the first time a German school would be having that global learning via the online medium. It was quite successful and it was recognised by the government, ” he said.

Having done that, Femi-Dagunro began to think about how to reach out and develop the grassroots in Ogudu area.

“If you look at Ogudu; there’s Ogudu GRA, which is the popular one, and Ogudu the village or the ghetto,” he said referring to the impoverished part of Ogudu.

He realised, he said, “that if we don’t begin to develop the ghetto, if Anything happens, these guys from the ghetto would drive the people away from the GRA”.

Right there in Ogudu ghetto, his initiative has begun to give free medical healthcare to the elderly who are above the age of 60 at the Inland Medical Specialist Hospital.

“We have been doing that now for the past six months. After the age of 60, we just register you and you go there and have free medical treatment,” Femi-Dagunro said.

“We have treated between 15 to 20 people for now”. He has also empowered traders in the area with cash and flexible ways of paying back fifty percent of the money after some months.

Last week, the Ogudu Empowerment Experience offered digital training to the Ogudu youth between Tuesday and Saturday.

“It was known as a digital week, a week to browse free of charge and do things online responsibly while also acquiring digital knowledge.

“Some of the youth had powerful phones already and we were showing them that their phones can do more than just make and receive phone calls.”

The first step was to assess the knowledge of the participants on the use of computer, the Internet and the social media.

But the assessment, he said, exposed Nigeria’s digital challenges. ‎

“Their limitation is that most of them cannot afford to browse regularly. Internet remains very expensive in Nigeria, ” he said.

“Because of the price, most of them just go to Facebook and chat. They are not really using the Internet to educate themselves. They cannot download things because the Internet is slow and they can’t afford to browse for a long time.”

But Nigerian youth need to go beyond Facebook.

“They should be able to go online and learn for instance how to write a CV how to improve it and do other things but Internet remain too expensive here.”

“In Germany for instance with 50euros (N11,500), you can phone any landline in the whole of Germany plus 24 hour unlimited Internet‎ for 50 euros, but here in the small place, we pay N20,000 for just 20 Gigabytes in the month. How do you expect these guys to have money to do that?”

The price of the Internet is a national challenge for Nigeria which is deterring the youth from growing their digital knowledge.

“These guys in the village, in Ogudu ghetto, they are being pushed aside, ” Femi-Dagunro said.

“The government of Nigeria is not really serious about this. Officials talk too much but act very little,” he said.

He suggested that the government begins to set up technology parks, some kinds of free Internet locations across the country for research purposes.

“First, we need to begin to have technology parks scattered all over local governments in this country where people can browse for free, where you can do free research, where you can go and read free of charge and acquire any other online knowledge.

“Secondly, we have to be developing softwares locally, softwares ‎that will match our own environment and be useful to the market that we have.

“Thirdly, Internet should be made cheap and available to most people, especially the youth,” he said.