Vice President Kashim Shettima on Tuesday, said the Federal Government has renewed its strategic partnership with the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) to train and empower 20 million young Nigerians with digital skills by 2030.

This is just as the Vice President has accepted to chair the board of Generation Unlimited Nigeria (GenU 9JA), a public-private-youth partnership platform constituted to help young Nigerians between the ages of 10 and 24 transition from learning to earning through digital connectivity.

Shettima, while speaking during a meeting with Mohammed Fall, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator; Rownak Khan, UNICEF Deputy Representative and Celine Lafoucriere, Chief of the UNICEF Lagos Field Office, at the President Villa, Abuja, warned that Nigeria’s rapidly growing population, currently estimated at over 230 million with an average age of 17, presents both a challenge and an opportunity.

Shettima described his invitation to serve as Chair of the Generation Unlimited (GenU 9JA), as a great honour, adding that ” This platform provides a vista of opportunities for our young people. Beyond rhetoric, if we want to survive and thrive, we must empower our youth through digital means. That’s the only way forward,” the Vice President said.

The GenU 9JA initiative aligns with the Federal Government’s Renewed Hope Agenda, which prioritises inclusive development, digital innovation, and youth empowerment as tools for national transformation.

Shettima stressed that Nigeria is not seeking handouts but sustainable, equitable partnerships. “We are not looking for charity. We want a mutually beneficial relationship—one based on respect and shared interests. This is why I’m very passionate about the digital initiative. Beyond leadership in our enlightened self-interest, if we want to live in this part of the world, we have to involve them, we have to empower them,” he said.

He described the initiative as a beautiful programme that would enable the Nigerian youths trade their skills in the global market, saying “from earning to learning is a beautiful initiative and more than any other platform, the digital space gives us the easiest window to get the youth engaged effortlessly.

“They can trade their skills in the global market. I know of a lot of young Nigerians who are working for global firms from the comfort of their homes,” he added.

Fall had in his remarks earlier, praised Nigeria’s leadership under President Bola Tinubu, noting that the GenU platform is central to addressing youth unemployment, educational inequality, and digital exclusion.

“Under the Renewed Hope Agenda, youth-focused initiatives—skills, digital access, and employment—are critical. And GenU is helping to drive those priorities,” Fall said.

Also, Khan, in his remarks, revealed that the GenU 9JA is one of UNICEF’s most successful global youth empowerment programmes, with Nigeria showcased as a model.

“We’ve seen incredible results from Nigeria. Few countries globally have recorded the level of youth impact that GenU 9JA has achieved,” she said.

According to Khan, the programme is built on three pillars: digital connectivity, pathways from learning to earning, and youth engagement and empowerment—all designed to prepare Nigerian youth for today’s job market.

On her part, Celine Lafoucriere, noted that since its launch in 2022, GenU 9JA has impacted over 10 million young people, with 1,500 job linkages already secured.

“To reach our target of 20 million youth by 2030, we must now strengthen coordination among partners and align even more closely with national policy,” Lafoucriere said.

Broadcom has begun to ship its latest networking chip that aims to speed AI, the company said on Tuesday. The chip, called the Tomahawk 6, boasts double the performance compared with the prior version and other traffic control features that make the networking chip significantly more efficient, Ram Velaga, a Broadcom senior vice president, told Reuters.

The speed boost means that fewer networking switches are needed to perform the same task, Velaga said.

Broadcom’s networking chips have gained increased importance because of AI. When constructing the necessary data centers for AI applications, infrastructure builders must string together hundreds or thousands of chips.

Building large-scale clusters of networked chips requires specialized networking gear and chips, of which the Tomahawk series of processors is one such component.

With the Tomahawk 6, Broadcom’s engineers have boosted its speed and capabilities to the point where it can be used to construct the larger data centers that are necessary for AI, which can be over 100,000 graphics processors (GPUs) strung together, Velaga said.

“In a couple of years, you will start to see a million GPUs housed inside a physical building,” he said.

Broadcom’s networking chips use the Ethernet networking protocol, which has been a networking standard for decades.

Nvidia produces hardware that uses a rival tech called InfiniBand and several products based on Ethernet.

“All of these networks can be very simply done on Ethernet, you don’t need esoteric technologies,” Velaga said.

The Tomahawk 6 is the first product in that line that will use several chips combined into a single package, a tech known as chiplets that is widely adopted by other chip designers such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O). Adding chiplets roughly doubled the amount of silicon area used in the design, Velaga said.

Broadcom is producing the Tomahawk switch on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s three nanometer process.

Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has called for radical and urgent interventions to curb the rising wave of sophisticated digital examination fraud in Nigeria.

JAMB warned that the trend can cause long-term damage to the country’s education system.

Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, JAMB Registrar, made this call during a recent event in Abuja, as reported in the JAMB Bulletin published Monday.

Oloyede described the evolving tactics employed by fraudsters during the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) as “worrisome, highly sophisticated, and capable of jeopardising national development.”

“Malpractice is not only compromising learning and research, it is endangering our collective future,” Oloyede warned.

“There is an urgent need for decisive action on these new and disturbing developments. The public must not treat this menace with levity.”

He lamented that instead of addressing the growing problem, “some people are dissipating their energies on spreading unhelpful conspiracy theories and hatred, while our future is being jeopardised by a new crop of sophisticated digital fraudsters.”

The registrar detailed how high-level examination malpractices were uncovered during the 2025 UTME, leading to the withdrawal of some results and the arrest of several culprits nationwide.

According to him, JAMB discovered that certain Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres and school proprietors had colluded with hackers to gain remote access to candidates’ systems and submit pre-programmed answers to local servers at compromised centres.

Oloyede also highlighted the use of AI-enabled photo blending to impersonate candidates, noting that many of the impersonators were current undergraduates. Other fraudulent tactics included:

He said they also include registration with combined fingerprints through the combination of fingerprints from multiple persons for a single candidate’s registration.

He cited the extension of local area networks from some dubious centres to remote “strong rooms” as well as the pairing of candidates with professional mercenaries to gain access to the examination hall.

He revealed that over 3,000 candidates have been identified as either accomplices or beneficiaries of these crimes, stressing that many of them are university students already enrolled in institutions.