Young Talents' Mobilisation: Boosting Nigeria's GDP As Software Developers

The field of software engineering is highly demanding of intellect, mental agility, nimbleness, focus, and time management savvy such that only the youths are in the best stead to make a huge success out of it.

In 2011, Marc Andreessen famously wrote a prescient claim: "Software is eating the world." 

This is to the extent that we see software startups today disrupting the traditional ways of doing things so much so that traditional industries are transforming and those incapable of transforming are folding up.

 Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug-fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. 

Those in the practice of software development are known as software developers or engineers.

Software developers are the ones developing all the different apps that are 'eating' the world today.

At the pace that applications (apps) are disrupting every aspect of life, it can then be said without contradiction that apps can be great sources of revenue as well as a boost to a nation's gross domestic product (GDP).

The gross domestic product can be explained as a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced and sold in a specific time period by countries. 

The Perspective of Nigeria's National Information Technology Development Agency(NITDA) 

Software development if adequately harnessed and backed with the right policies is capable of earning Nigeria $40 billion in revenue on a yearly basis. 

According to the Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency(NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa, Nigeria is blessed with the required talents to achieve this.

While speaking in Lagos recently at a joint stakeholder meeting with the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and all IT-enabled companies in Nigeria, Inuwa strongly canvassed this position. 

Citing a recent PwC report, which revealed that there was a need for about four million software developers globally and that Nigeria could supply two million of that talent given its youthful and talented population, Inuwa said training more software developers to meet this need would earn Nigeria revenue far higher than oil.

The NITDA DG noted that before the PwC report, the Agency had launched a one million software developers initiative to produce more software developers for the country.

Under the initiative, he said a total of 215, 524 Nigerians have been trained so far.

Speaking on the competitive advantage that could give Nigeria the edge in the global software development ecosystem, Inuwa observed “globally we have a competitive advantage in terms of our youthful population and in terms of our natural talent.

"We have proven to the world that we are talented when it comes to sports, music, movies, and all that, so we can do the same thing in the area of technology.”

Mobilizing The Youths to Wear These App Hats

Inuwa's analyses continued: “So, they said today there is a need for about four million developers globally.

"And Nigeria can conveniently provide two million developers

“On average, a developer earns between $25,000 to $130,000.

“So, let’s say because you are in Nigeria and you are working remotely, you will earn only $20,000. 

"If we can provide those two million developers to the global value chain, Nigeria will earn $40 billion per annum, which is more than the remittance of oil and gas.

"Today, we can say maybe we are earning nothing from oil and gas in terms of forex.

"So, this alone can solve our Forex challenge,” he stressed.

From all of these, the Nigerian government will do well to come up with all laudable objectives to galvanize and inspire our youths into taking to software development.

When this is successfully accomplished, the ripple effects on the nation's GDP are better imagined.