Experts move to replicate Silicon Valley in Nigeria

With a burgeoning youth population facing growing employment challenges, the need for Nigeria to embrace software development and key into vast earning available from it has been stressed.

This is coming on the heels of a recent report by a United States marketing research company, App Annie, which stated that earnings from apps are expected to hit $189 billion by 2020. According to the report, people downloaded 90 billion apps, on both the Apple iTunes app store and Google Play in 2016.

In 2017, revenues from paid apps, subscriptions, and in-app purchases rose by 35 per cent with users spending nearly $60 billion on apps on Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store according to a report by Sensor Tower, a global Store Intelligence Digest.

Based on these statistics, Silicon Valley Nigerian Economic Development (SV-NED Inc), a company dedicated to the establishment of a strategic, bilateral economic relationship between the country and Silicon Valley, America’s biggest technology hub, is set to train, retain and recruit gifted Nigerians for internship and full time employment placement in leading technology firms around the world.

Speaking on the initiative in Lagos, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, SV-NED Inc, Chief Temitope Ajayi, said the training tagged “2nd Immersion Programme” is an intensive week of immersion into Silicon Valley’s culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.

“Our goal is to inspire, educate and connect participants with vast business opportunities in Silicon Valley”, she said.

According to her, participants are going to get the latest knowledge on Artificial Intelligence, Business intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Startups, Digital Marketing, Software Engineering, Cloud among others.

She added that some of the brightest professors from Ivy League universities in the United States such as Stanford, Harvard, New York (NYU), and San Francisco are expected to facilitate the training in the country.

Noting that one of the world’s richest men, Warren Buffett, was responsible for India’s new status as a vibrant tech hub, Ajayi stated that Nigerian technological experts do not need to travel to America to earn money, they could work offshore and do well anywhere.

She however stressed that it is high time the nation developed the capacity to train young software programmers in different part of the country and pointed out that a situation where Africa has only 500 incubators and Nigeria owned only 32 is embarrassing when China has over 1500 incubators to train their tech savvy youths.

Ajayi said: “By this time next year, we are going to have over a thousand incubators because that is the way we can go to all the nooks and corners of the nation. We have experts coming to teach our youths how to make money from an incubator”.