The Edo State Governor, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, has announced plans by his administration to train 15, 000 software engineers and other technology experts at the Edo Enterprise Park by 2026.
The governor made this known on Tuesday, 22 March 2022, at the Taipei Smart City Summit where he was the only African leader invited alongside leaders from France, the United Kingdom, Poland, Belgium, Czech Republic, Malaysia and Taiwan.
Speaking to the topic “New Normal with digital transformation”, Obaseki explained how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the earnings of families in the state and Nigeria as a whole, forcing national and sub-national governments to seek internal solutions to reduce the effect of subsequent pandemics.
He said the pandemic helped Edo double-down on its ongoing initiatives like the Edo Enterprise Park, Benin Medical District, among others to build resilience and improve the quality of life for residents.
The Edo Enterprise Park is a private sector-led industrial park which aims to provide efficient and competitive infrastructure to international and local companies.
The project is being developed in phases over on a 900-hectare location along the Benin-Sapele highway and would include a designated area for oil and gas service companies to maximise Edo’s competitive advantage in gas production.
Obaseki noted that Edo “is focusing on technology and for us; it’s about building people, young people through technology. We have designed a technology park where we expect to train between 10,000 to 15,000 software engineers and technical experts over the next few years.
“For us our focus as a people and as a state is on our culture, trying to find out who we are, understanding who we are and how to engage the world to preserve our ecosystem particularly our forestry, our rainforest and to utilize technology to drive our human development particularly in the areas of education and skills development and security.”
He added: “Benin City has about 2,000 square kilometers of land and our aspiration is first, we need to plan our cities, take advantage of the post covid-19 to build infrastructure, we see this as an opportunity to leapfrog using technology in building our infrastructure and human capacity.”
The Governor told the world leaders and the nearly 1000 viewers on the live-streamed event how Edo’s focus on building its infrastructure, sourcing investments and nationalizing the use of technology in the governance process, education and health care systems within the Edo 30-year development master plan.
