Digital skills: What Nigeria must learn from Zambia’s TVET reality
By Precious Ebere -Chinonso Obi
Across Africa, governments are racing to prepare young people for a digital future. Policies are being written, strategies launched, and investments announced, all aimed at equipping the youth with the skills needed for a rapidly changing economy.
But beneath this momentum lies a more uncomfortable question: Are our education systems actually delivering those skills?
Recent findings from World Bank-supported research on Zambia’s technical and vocational education and training (TVET) system offer a revealing answer and one that Nigeria would do well to pay attention to because the story is not unique to Zambia.
On paper, Zambia is making progress, institutions report internet access, digital policies are in place and there seems to be a clear intent to build a digital workforce, yet inside classrooms, the reality is different.
Unreliable electricity disrupts learning, devices are scarce, and teachers lack the skills to effectively integrate technology into instruction. Students, in turn, graduate with only basic digital abilities often limited to what they pick up from everyday smartphone use. This reality isn’t quite new as Nigeria faces a similar risk.
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There is no shortage of digital economy strategies, innovation hubs, or youth empowerment programs but in many technical colleges and vocational institutions, the fundamentals: power, devices and trained instructors remain inconsistent.
One of the most striking elements of the Zambia study is its use of task-based assessments to test what students and teachers can actually do, rather than what they claim to know and the results were sobering.
Teachers struggled with basic digital tasks such as managing files or conducting effective online searches. Students performed even lower, with limited awareness of online safety, data management, or problem-solving in digital environments.
This raises an important question for Nigeria: Do we truly know the digital competence of our graduates or are we relying on assumptions?
In a labor market where even traditionally “low-tech” jobs now require digital interaction from mobile payments to logistics platforms, this gap is no longer acceptable. There is a tendency in policy circles to equate digital progress with infrastructure: more internet connectivity, more devices and more platforms.
As Zambia’s experience shows, without reliable electricity, those devices are useless. Without trained instructors, technology is underutilized. Without structured curricula, students do not develop meaningful competencies. Nigeria must resist the temptation to focus on visible investments while neglecting the less visible but more critical systems that make them work.
Technical and vocational education sits at the heart of this conversation. It is where millions of young Nigerians particularly those outside the university system acquire the skills that will determine their employability, yet TVET remains underprioritized.
The lesson from Zambia is not that progress is impossible. In fact, there are encouraging signs, policy momentum, infrastructure expansion, and new initiatives linking digital skills to employment pathways.
For Nigeria, this means three things. First, digital skills must be embedded into TVET curricula not as optional add-ons, but as core competencies across all trades. Second, teacher capacity must be prioritized. A digitally ill-equipped instructor cannot produce digitally capable students.
Third, investments in infrastructure must be holistic. Electricity, connectivity, devices, and technical support must work together not in isolation.
The reality is that the future of work is no longer approaching, it is already here. From retail to transportation to hospitality, digital tools are reshaping how jobs are performed and workers who cannot adapt risk being left behind.
For Nigeria, with one of the largest youth populations in the world, the stakes could not be higher and it has to be treated as economic survival.
Zambia’s experience offers Nigeria something valuable: a mirror. It shows what happens when ambition outpaces implementation and what must be done to close the gap.
I believe Nigeria still has time to get this right but doing so will require moving beyond policies and pilot programs to sustained, system-wide reform because in the end, the true measure of a digital economy is not the number of strategies it produces but the number of young people it equips to thrive within it.
- Precious Ebere-Chinonso Obi, CEO of Do Take Action, is an independent consultant on edtech, climate change, public policy, and women’s procurement empowerment
