National digital skills and strategy work
Moving from building products to shaping the public systems around them, through consulting roles on Nigeria's national and state digital skills strategies.
The challenge
An EdTech company can reach tens of thousands of learners. A national framework shapes what happens for tens of millions. Nigeria set itself ambitious digital literacy targets, and turning those ambitions into a framework that states, schools and training providers could actually implement required people who had done digital skills delivery on the ground.
My role
I contributed as a consultant, not as an author of government policy, and the distinction matters to me. My work included consulting on the NITDA National Digital Literacy Framework, published in 2023, and on the National Digital Skills Strategy that followed. At state level I served as lead consultant on the Smart Katsina Digital Transformation Strategy.
Around these engagements I served as a member of the Northern Ecosystem Working Group convened under UNDP, offered voluntary technical advice on ICT policy, and supported the Nigeria Jubilee Fellows Programme, a Federal Government and UNDP initiative, where my work included digital and workplace readiness screening deployed to thousands of candidates, and onboarding and mentoring fellows.
The approach
My contribution in each case came from the same place: practical delivery experience. Having trained students and teachers at scale, built assessment and talent platforms, and watched programmes succeed and fail in real classrooms, I could help ground strategy documents in what implementation actually requires, from teacher capacity to offline delivery to measurement.
What changed
The National Digital Literacy Framework now anchors Nigeria's push towards its national digital literacy targets, and the Smart Katsina strategy gave one Northern state a concrete digital transformation roadmap. Within the Jubilee Fellows Programme, readiness screening helped match thousands of graduates to placements more effectively.
Evidence
Independently verifiable. The National Digital Literacy Framework is published by NITDA, and the Nigeria Jubilee Fellows Programme is a documented Federal Government, European Union and UNDP initiative.
Owner-stated. My specific consulting roles on these programmes are stated here directly; consulting contributions of this kind are not usually credited in public documents.
What I learned
Policy is a product with very slow feedback loops. The disciplines transfer, user research becomes stakeholder consultation, and iteration becomes implementation review, but the patience required is of a different order. I also learned that credibility in the room comes from having built things, not from having opinions about them.