Despite the high rate of internet fraud in the country some secondary school girls in Ilorin the Kwara State capital have been trained on skills in Information technology IT.
The Kwara State coordinator of Nigeria women in technology Mrs Abimbola Akintola stated this at the presentation of certificates and gifts to 18 secondary school girls that participated at the programme in Ilorin the Kwara State capital.
Her words, “We won’t say we want to train anybody on how to engaged in Cyber crime, we are not doing that we are training them on skills in IT, different areas they can pick from, you can’t say because you have a bad eggs, you are going to throw away all the eggs those that are doing that we live them to the law” she said.
“It’s the responsibility of all of us to train the girls, I’m in education, i cant say i dont want more females to join me, let them know what is involved , let them pick their interest instead of all of them going into just a particular section, i want to be an accountant, I want to be a lawyer, let them know what is going on in the world” she said
“Like I told the girls, everything now has been brought to your doorstep, they can’t say because they are in the school, they don’t have computers, they dont have internet facility because of that they are not into IT you have different applications that you can put on your phone, if you dont have a phone you can make use of your parents phone learn from it download materials read them, there are applications that can be installed on the phone, it will be good if they have it in school but if it is not available in school, make use of what you have. they can make use of their parents phone and learn from it, there are different applications that can be installed in the phone, it will be good if the school have but if it not available in school, you make use of what you have.” She added
“My advise is for them to be focused, know what they are doing and the time is now, dont say you are going to learn it tomorrow learn it now, no matter how old you are, start learning now.
“Nigeria women in technology is under the umbrella body of the Nigeria Computer society we are members of Nigeria Computer society NCS we now have women in IT that belong to NCS Nigerian Computer society and the main objective is to bridge the gender gap in IT and how do we do that we go to secondary schools sensitise our females our girls to have interest in IT, what can you do with IT, how can you go into it we have soft ware engineers, we have the network engineers there different types of IT that they can pick from, You just demonstrate for them and let them pick their interest is a digital world, everything has changed and keep changing what we just have to do regularly is to train the girls and let them pick interest if you bring out ten programmers you are likely to see nine male and probably just two females how do let the girls know that this is not difficult it is what you can do”she said
