The Federal Government has trained over 10,000 women, including Persons with Disabilities on the rudiments of Information and Communication Technologies, ICT as a strategy for women empowerment, ending Gender Based Violence and improved national productivity.
The Director, ICT, National Centre for Women Development, Morrison Udobong, made this known in Abuja at the closing ceremony of a five-day ICT and entrepreneurial training for visually and hearing-impaired rural women.
Mr Udobong said ICT had the capacity to accommodate the needs of persons with disabilities to acquire knowledge and access information that enable them to integrate and contribute to development.
“Over the years, we have trained over 10 thousand women on various ICT courses and feedback from monitoring officers showed they are all doing well in their chosen endeavors,” Mr Udobong explained.
“During this program, the Participants with disabilities were exposed to various Computer Aided & Adaptive Technologies required to Educate, raise their Self esteem, Integrate and empower them to be useful and productive in their endeavours,” he added.
The Director General, National Center for Women Development, Asabe Vilita-Bashir, said the training would expose the women to the tools and techniques of ICT, which would enhance their ability to interact with information relevant for their productivity and self-reliance.
“This is aimed at exposing the participants to various Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) applications, tools and techniques which have the potential to make significant improvements in the lives of persons with disabilities,” Dr Vilita-Bashir pointed out.
“This allows them to enhance their social, cultural, political and economic integration in communities by enlarging the scope of activities available to them,”she stressed.
The President, National Association of the Blind, Abuja chapter, Jacob Ogada, expressed appreciation to the federal government for their support to PWD’s, and urged them to employ more of their members as a way of empowerment.
responding on behalf of participants, Uche Andrew, who has hearing impairment, spoke through an Interpreter: assuring the government that the beneficiaries will make judicious use of the skills acquired, and will use the laptops to further develop themselves on ICT.
“Before now, many of us see laptop but we don’t even know how to operate it; we don’t know where to press and what to do with it,” Ms Andrew explained.
“But this one-week training has given us an opportunity to know how to operate a laptop and to also do certain things with it,” she added.
Other highlights of the events were the distribution of brand-new laptops, Certificates of Participation and payment of stipends for transportation to all the participants.
Reporting by Azizatu Sani, editing by Daniel Adejo