President Bola Tinubu has approved N120 billion to revive technical education in the country.
Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa stated this at the third edition of the 2025 Ministerial Press Briefing Session in Abuja on Thursday.
Alausa said the federal government was refocusing the country’s education to technical education.
The minister said the start up for students’ entrepreneurial mode would be flagged off in May.
He said that the country is presently focusing on the value chain in technical education where practical education would be given to train artisans.
He explained that a dual mode of training would be given which would offer students to spend three days in school, one day for gigantic training and one day in the workshop.
“We have almost N120bn and the President has approved it for us to move this agenda forward.
“This program will be launched probably in the month of May,” the minister said.
Alausa also said that the Tinubu administration would offer six-months free skills training to Nigerians to service industries in the country.
According to him, this would address the 2 million job vacancies in the country.
The minister said the Federal Ministry of Education was putting measures to encourage Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) to meet the areas of needs of the country.
He said this would be done through the Digital Training Academy (DTA) to give students skills to service industries.
Alausa said: “Today, based on UNESCO data, there are 650,000 vacancies in software development methodologies, about 280,000 vacancies in cyber security, and about 160,000 vacancies in IT automation.
“Another 150,000 vacancies in AI and machine learning, about 120,000 vacancies in cloud computing, bout 60,000 vacancies worldwide in national language processing.
“Add that together, we have almost 2 million job vacancies out there. So what we’re doing with Digital Training Academy is working with trainers now, that will offer six- months to people, young engineers, to get this training.
“We, as a government, we will pay for their internet services, pay for their certification- Cisco certification, End of Career certification, and Google certification.”
Alausa said the strategy would give Nigerians new digital skills that they need to stand out in the world.
He added that the training would be launched on or before June 2025.
Alausa reiterated the commitment of the government to return 10 million out-of-school children to the classrooms
He said the ministry was working on a new strategy to increase access, improve quality and enhance education systems for foundational learning.
Alausa said between now and 2027, the government is going to reconstruct 195,000 classrooms across the nation.
“With regards to infrastructure, between now and 2027, we will need to raise 195,000 classrooms across the nation.
“We will install 28, 000 toilets, 22,900 boreholes across other schools in the country.
“We will construct about 7,000 new classrooms. And, as we do this with the provision of learning and teaching materials by organising 103 million textbooks,” he said.
He also said that the Tinubu administration has committed N40 billion to the abandoned National Library of Nigeria project.
The minister said work on the library project would soon commence, adding that this would support academic and research needs.