Nigeria saves N300 billion on overseas training – Official

The Federal Government has saved not less than N300 billion from overseas training courtesy of the Centre for Management Development (CMD) via its local content policy, an official said.

The Director General of the CMD, Kabir Usman, disclosed this to Economic Confidential in Abuja.

“There is also the local content agenda because there was a Circular from the Office of the Head of Service that Civil Servants should not just go for overseas training except and unless they got an approval that the kind of training cannot be acquired in Nigeria.”, he said.

“So, when you look at it and to be very honest with ourselves, we get about 500,000 Nigerians going for one training or the other overseas.”

“Even if you reduce the figure to 100,000 and we pay about ten thousand US dollars for each person, you know we are talking of $1 billion dollars. So, if you translate it to Naira, it tells you about N300 billion”, he said.

“So, even if we are going to have one per cent of the local content being domesticated, we would save at least N1 billion and you will see the kind of the jobs we are going to create.”

Mr. Usman told Economic Confidential that the Centre has also done quite a lot in terms of accreditation and issues about quality assurance, issues about impact assessment.

“I really want to emphasize that this is a very important activity to us because some management consultants moving around with briefcase are not doing what they are supposed to do in terms of providing quality training. Some are compromised, but we have ensured that this is not the case. We gave the Carrot and not the Stick to support training agencies with benchmarks, with guidelines, with rules and regulations so that they can operate in a very ethical manner,” he said.

He stated that the centre is instrumental to the quality training that is being provided by the Office of the Head of Service in collaboration with the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria, ASCON, and the Public Service Institute, adding that same has been done that to thousands over the period that he has been the head.

On collaborative efforts with other organisations of like-minds, he said the centre has done quite a lot in terms of partnerships in collaboration with many other agencies of the government mainly the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, NIPSS and other management development agencies.

“We provided a lot of trainings to EFCC, ICPC and many other agencies of government that we felt have strategic responsibility of moving the country to the next level. And to say the least we got partnership with the African Capacity Building Foundation that is based in Zimbabwe. It is actually a project that was created in the UK out of concern of some Africans about lack of capacity in the African region. The foundation gave us a grant and we did a lot of training for about ten years (from 2004 to 2013). The grant was $700,000 but we started using the funds in 2010 when I came. We used half of this fund for training in planning and budgeting across the country and it was free as the participants were not charged, rather we provided feeding, accommodation and rest of it to the participants. And that was the basis of enhanced planning and budgeting which we are trying to support the activities of departments of Planning, Research and Statistics of the MDAs in the country.”

“We provide training in the areas of project management so that we have relevant projects that are going to add value to our people.”