Impediments to ICT-led Development in Nigeria: the Case of ICT ‘Illiteracy’ in Universities

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can play a major role in development. Accordingly, nations and institutions are making enormous efforts to promote their utilisation. In many of these efforts, it is taken for granted that once ICT facilities are acquired, they will be put to uses that are crucially relevant to development. This paper reports the findings of a study that brought this presumption to question, taking the case of knowledge and use of these technologies among 5118 students and 1509 academic staff of 97 universities in Nigeria. It reports that majority of the respondents and, by inference, people in Nigeria do not have the ICT competence required to harness the benefits that the technologies offer. Therefore, it is recommended that ICT and development policy makers at all levels in the country put the development of ICT competence at the centre of efforts to promote ICT-led development.