NIC to usher a vibrant new era of entrepreneurship

ISLAMABAD: The Board of Directors of Ignite - National Technology Fund (formerly National ICT R&D Fund) approved the award of contract of DigiSkills Training Project and National Incubation Center Karachi under the chairmanship of Minister of State for IT and Telecom Mrs. Anusha Rahman.

Anusha while expressing her satisfaction over the on target launch of the Peshawar NIC, said NIC, Peshawar will usher a vibrant new era of entrepreneurship and innovation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, enabling many aspiring tech entrepreneurs and startups in creating game-changing solutions, said a press release issued here.

The board also accorded approval for the award of contract for the flagship 1 Million DigiSkills program. She said the “DigiSkills Program” was being initiated to fill Industry-Academia gap through appropriate training and mentorship.

The board was told that initially 12 training modules were being introduced in DigiSkills program which will be scaled up in the subsequent phases. Initial modules being launched touch upon the areas of Digital Literacy, marketing, freelancing, graphics design, creative writing and e-commerce management etc.

The key differentiating factor of the program would be that it will utilize artificial intelligence and data driven decision making for matching content with trainees and to fine tune the quality of content and coach to trainee ratio. Subsequent phases would include deeper areas of IT focus like data sciences, cyber security and others.

Discussing the target number of trainees, the board expressed the view that “one million is a national target and program will be available free of cost to much larger number of the population to make people self-employable.”

The minister said the DigiSkills program was a scaled version of the ICT for Girls program being implemented by the USF Co. which started with the establishment of some 150 labs complete with Microsoft 4Cs training program for around 35000 disadvantaged girls per year.

The program was then scaled to 226 girls’ schools with training and teachers included to benefit more than 110,000 girl students of Islamabad region annually. To further scale the efforts the Ignite board gave target to ignite Co. about a year ago to initiate planning for the 1 Million program which finally attained current shape and form after various deliberations and consultative sessions with the industry and several meetings of the board.

The board also congratulated the Ignite team on successful launching of NIC Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar and asked CEO Ignite to gear up his team for next endeavors, launching of National Incubation Center Quetta and Karachi respectively.