By Jawolusi Oluwaseun Solomon

“Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave” (Henry Peter Brougham)

The Pediak initiative is an ICT consultancy canvassing for Public Private Partnership (PPP) in Nigeria’s Education sector, using ICT Education and skills acquisition as an engagement tool for youth empowerment and national development.

The essence of this initiative is to encourage practical participation, rather than the often times theoretical approach by the public sector to maximize the crucial roles that the private sector’s involvement can play in the realization of the “ICT Education for all” goal.

If Nigeria must develop, her citizens must inculcate the culture of reading and learning in order to facilitate her paradigm shift from a consuming nation to a producing nation. Clearly, business benefits from a well-educated work force, political stability and economic growth - all products of a sound education system.

Public Private Partnership is a fused name for a range of initiatives that involves the private sector with the governments for national development. Partnership enhances cooperation of national and community leaders for the provision of social responsibilities.
In reference to a paper (The Role of Public Private Partnership in Education) delivered by Dr. Yakubu Fisse (who represented Senator Emmanuel Bwacha) on the occasion of the Graduation of the Primary Pupils of Grace Junior Academy, Jalingo, Taraba State, on 6th August 2011 - Below, I will give four key features of Public Private Partnership (PPP).

1. In essence, a PPP is a form of collaboration or joint endeavour between the public and private sectors for the purposes of implementing a project, whereby the resources, strength and capabilities of each parties are brought together. This is done in a way which allocates risks and responsibilities between them in a rational manner designed to achieve the optimum balance from each perspective.

2. In practice, PPP structures usually involve the transfer of much of the responsibility for financing, designing, constructing and operating the project and most of the risks associated with these activities to the private sector- whilst allowing certain (often residual) responsibilities and risks to be retained by the public sector.
Effective education can best be achieved when government collaborates with a range of other actor’s in private sector, civil society, independent experts, communities and families.

3. PPP systems entail the pooling of competencies, resources, and capacities from the public and private sector to achieve outcomes that add value beyond what either party could achieve acting alone. The approach builds on the idea that different sectors in society have different yet potentially complementary core competencies and resources that, if appropriately joined, produce positive results for national benefits.

4. Governments benefit from PPP by gaining access to corporate expertise in management, strategic planning, innovative solutions, labour market expertise, skills development, efficient delivery of services, project development, and logistics support.

The ICT business cuts across borders as it allows limitless collaboration between individuals and governments in different geographical locations. To this end, I recently launched an ICT empowerment book titled: “Empowering Youths with 30+ Lucrative ICT ideas”, containing 30 chapters and more than 30 money-making ICT ideas. Also the book is supported with an e-Learning Forum Website (www.pediak.com) to freely aid further learning.

The Pediak Team is a group of certified ICT Professionals on a mission to create awareness for PPP collaboration in ICT skills acquisition for Nigerians through support of seminars and training, using some select lucrative ICT ideas written in my Pediak book as guide. The vision of the team is to curb unemployment and problems using ICT education as skills acquisition tool for national development and to provide an avenue for productive investment for entrepreneurs seeking for lucrative business ideas.

Jawolusi Oluwaseun Solomon ( PediakAuthor ).