No fewer than 135,000 youths resident in Imo State have been trained in the area of ICT skills by the Leo Stan Foundation, a not-for-profit founded and funded by serial digital entrepreneur, Leo Stan Ekeh.

The training which is free for all trainees was conceived under the Governor Rochas Okorocha era was aborted by the Covid-19 lockdown but it would continue as soon as talks with the government of Hope Uzodinma were finalised.

This was disclosed by the Director-General of the Foundation, Mr. Amasike Emelonye, in a chat with Political Economist.

“We decided to train secondary school leavers and JAMB candidates in all the local government areas using facilities that were built for Imo State youths under former Gov. Rochas Okorocha (He built 27 ICT centres, one in each LGA, powered with 50 computers each and all the computers are either from Zinox or Technology Distributions and they are all working effectively).

“We did many trainings then, beginning with 5,000 per Local Government. If you multiply this number by 27 at a cost of N5,000 per trainee, you’ll know how many we were able to train within the period and what it has cost the Foundation,” he said.

According to the DG, aside the N5,000 training cost borne by the Foundation, transport allowances were provided for the trainees during the period of their training, pushing the total expenses to over N675 million.

Emelonye, a seasoned ICT expert who had worked with Task Systems, IBM and Zinox among other global brands, said the training centred on computer appreciation and basic techniques in applications to prepare the youths for the future.

“The target was chiefly youths preparing to write computer-based examinations such as the JAMB exam. The reason why people don’t do well in JAMB in the state is not because they’re not intelligent. You can understand that when you imagine a child in the rural area who has not seen a computer before and all of a sudden you give that child a PC to do a test on. You are not likely to see the child perform optimally.”

“I have pleaded with the current Commissioner who superintends the programme to restart the training because of its relevance to Imo youths at this time,” he said.

Emelonye said the Foundation has given out zero interest loans to traders in the state and would continue to do so and even extend the loans to other states in the coming years. Recall that recently, Leo Stan Ekeh donated the sum of N1.5 billion to support the Foundation.