E-PPAN urges FG to encourage young females in ICT

The Chief Executive Officer of E-Payment Providers Association of Nigeria (E-PPAN), Mrs Onajite Regha, has called on the government to organise entrepreneurial programmes for young girls.

Regha, who said this in Lagos last week, said that such programme would encourage the girls to embrace Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

She said that there should be a value re-orientation for young ladies to start businesses that revolved around ICT.

“The government can encourage young girls to embrace ICT through a catch-them-young entrepreneurial programme by creating vocational centres.

“Programmes that will change their orientation to develop careers in ICT as it is done in other countries like China should be introduced,” Regha said.

She said that people live in clans with beliefs that some careers were gender partial and that ICT business is unarguably one, adding that there was no reason for women to be segregated against in the sector.

She said that disruptive innovation in technology had taken over most of the petty or manual banking jobs, where women were at their best in the early 1990s.

Regha urged the government to make good policies that would create the enabling environment for entrepreneurs and provide loans for small and medium enterprises to thrive.

“Is it obvious that we have more men as stakeholders in ICT than women? But l believe such ideology is gradually fading now that there are disruptive innovations in technology.

“Things have since changed now that ICT has taken over a lot of jobs.

“Women have no choice than to upgrade themselves with such disruption and begin to take careers in such line,” Regha said.

Regha, however, advised women to widen their horizon and accept ICT as a career that could take them to places.