Nigerians in diaspora largest contributors to national income – NIDO

The Nigerians in Diaspora Organisation says it is the largest contributor to the country’s Gross National Income with an average of 23 billion dollars (about N7 trillion) sent home by its members annually.

Obed Monago, the Chairman, Board of Trustees of NIDO Americas, stated this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria alongside other members of the organisation in Abuja on Wednesday.

In a 2018 report, the World Bank said that Nigerians living abroad sent home 22 billion dollars in 2017, the highest in the Sub-Saharan region and the fifth highest in the world.

In the report titled: “Migration and Development Brief, the bank said the 2017 figure represented an increase of 10 per cent compared to the 19.64 billion dollars sent home in 2016.”

Monago said NIDO was contributing a lot to the economic development of Nigeria and could do much more when given the enabling environment by government.

According to him, the organisation’s branch in the United States is implementing several youth development programmes in the country, especially in the area of ICT training.

He said: “So far, three years in a row we have trained more than 300 Nigerian youths free of charge in different areas of ICT under the programmes.”

Shedding more light on this, Taofeeq Olatinwo, an ICT entrepreneur, said one notable area covered by the training was the development and use of mobile applications to solve social problems.

Olatinwo said: “Every year during the NIDO Day period, we gather youth from various regions of the country and take them to the innovation hub in Abuja where we train them on ICT.

“The training goes for about five days per session, and we bring professors and experts from the US and Canada to provide the trainings which are of global standards.

“We have taken it further to partner with the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment to see how this can be embedded.”

Olatinwo further said that plans were on to extend the programme to other parts of the country in collaboration with the Industrial Training Fund among other initiatives lined up.

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