The Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) says there are over 500,000 verified Data Protection Officers (DPOs) in the country, but less than 10,000 of them have data protection skills.

Vincent Olatunji, the national commissioner of NDPC, made this known to journalists on Friday during a working visit to the Data and Knowledge Information Privacy Protection Initiative (DKIPPI) in Lagos.

He further said that of the country’s 10,000 skilled data protection professionals, less than 5,000 are certified, representing two per cent of the total.

According to Mr Olatunji, the commission has prioritised building a pool of skilled and certified data protection professionals.

“We want to create jobs for people, and the jobs are there, but if we do not have the skills, how do we secure the jobs?” he asked.

He said the commission was partnering with the Data and Knowledge Information Privacy Protection Initiative (DKIPPI) to train data protection officers and close this certification gap.

Mr Olatunji said the DKIPPI would provide the training to prepare the data protection officers for their certification examination.

He said that the DKIPPI would train those to sit the exam, while the examination would be conducted by the Institute of Information Management  (IIM) and the certification endorsed by the NDPC.

“In other climes and looking at the issues around certification, most of those certified today have international certification which they obtained by paying in dollars for the training and to write the examination.

“Do we want to continue to have international certification, and how many people can afford it?

“This is why we came up with the idea of licensing a national certification body of international standard that can certify Nigeria Data Protection professionals,’’ he said.

He appreciated the DKIPPI, saying its president, Tokunbo Smith, had been contributing earnestly to the NDPC’s course.

(NAN)