Minister of Youth and Sports Development, Mr Sunday Dare, has revealed on Monday that Google is to earmark the sum $3.7 to improve small and medium businesses in Nigeria.
This was disclosed during the 2020 budget performance/2021 budget defence held at the instance of the House Committee on Youth Development, chaired by Hon Yemi Adaramodu.
The Minister also revealed that Ministry of Youth and Sport Development trained over 15,000 youth on digital skills throughout the COVID-19 lockdown and now, working with the IBM under the digital nation and the ministry’s Digital Youth Nigeria Initiative.
“Google will train 500,000 youth for free through a platform they are setting up. Google will provide $3.7 million for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) that are youth-driven based on a database put together by the ministry. We have an MoU with Wilco to train over 5,000 youth in digital metering and then we have a partnership with Guineas Nigeria. Not all of them are fully activated but we have signed MoUs and which should be on the way shortly.” he disclosed.
Giving an update on the budget performance, Mr Sunday Dare explained that out of the N2.8 billion approved for capital expenditure, the sum of N1.3 billion was released and in the last four years.
“Ministry trained over 15,000 youth on digital skills throughout the COVID-19 lockdown and now, working with the IBM under the digital nation and the ministry’s digital youth Nigeria initiative.
“We also realised that we needed to leverage in our Public-Private Partnership considering that we don’t have the kind of funding that we need. We have a Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) with IBM, Microsoft, recently we signed with Google.
