Empowering underserved learners with digital skills: Nigeria’s 3MTT program on AWS

Nigeria’s education and workforce systems face a pressing challenge: Millions of young people need market-relevant digital skills to access jobs in a fast-growing tech economy.

Nigeria’s out-of-school burden remains among the world’s largest, one in five of the world’s out-of-school children lives in Nigeria, with estimates placing the figure around 20 million affected children. The burden falls disproportionately on girls, rural communities, and crisis-affected regions.

Without targeted interventions, many young people transition into adulthood without the skills required by today’s economy. Workforce-oriented skilling has therefore become a critical bridge from exclusion to employability. This post explores how Nigeria’s The Three Million Technical Talent (3MTT) initiative—built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and supported by the AWS Education Equity Initiative (EEI)—is addressing this challenge by delivering market-relevant digital skills to millions of young people.

The program: Three Million Technical Talent (3MTT)

The 3MTT program, led by Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy (FMCIDE), is the government’s flagship program to train three million young Nigerians in digital and technical skills by 2027.

The program is aligned with the Nigerian president’s renewed hope agenda, which includes the goal of creating two million digital jobs by 2025. It is designed not only as a training program, but also as a national digital talent ecosystem. It aims to build Nigeria’s technical talent backbone to power the digital economy, create jobs, and position the country as a net exporter of talent. The program targets youth aged 18–35, including first-time digital learners, unemployed or underemployed individuals seeking career transformation, and young people from underserved communities.

3MTT blends cohort-based online instruction with a nationwide network of learning hubs and community groups. Fellows participate in Applied Learning Clusters (ALCs), which are physical centers where they receive mentorship, collaborate with peers, and complete hands-on projects. Access is further extended through Peer Learning Centers (PLCs), community-led study and practice groups that allow learners to meet, share ideas, and reinforce skills. These activities are coordinated nationally through the 3MTT learning community and supported by scheduled in-person and virtual sessions.

To deliver this at national scale, the program runs on a platform that was built from day one on AWS, providing the foundation for reliable, secure, and scalable access as the number of learners grows.

How AWS accelerated launch

From the outset, AWS provided the scalable cloud foundation that allowed the 3MTT program to reach learners nationwide. Promotional credits from the EEI supported the launch of the 3MTT talent portal, which today serves as the central platform for onboarding, course enrollment, progress tracking, assessments, and program reporting for millions of Nigerians.

The core build uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon CloudFront to deliver a consistent learner experience nationwide even during heavy traffic—maintaining 99.9 percent uptime.

National-scale progress to date

Since its launch, the 3MTT program has received more than 1.8 million applications and onboarded over 90,000 learners across cohorts 1 and 2, with over 35,000 currently enrolled in cohort 3. More than 7,500 3MTT fellows have secured jobs through employer networks and gig platforms and completed more than 2,000 real-world projects addressing community and market needs. Over 200 ALCs are operational nationwide, including offline-compatible centers in underserved areas. Participation includes 35 percent female learners, with an active target of 40 percent.

Future plans

The 3MTT program is scaling toward its target of three million learners by 2027. Planned milestones include training an additional 800,000 fellows by 2026, expanding learning access to more than 300 local government areas, embedding externships and career pathways to strengthen job readiness, and integrating AI-driven learning assistants and intelligent job-matching tools to personalize and scale learner support.

The program cost model estimates that human-only assistant support would average about USD $25 per student per year (roughly USD $75 million for three million learners), while an AWS-hosted AI approach could reduce support to approximately USD $2.6 per student per year, demonstrating how AWS cloud-based solutions enable scalable, sustainable delivery.

Conclusion

The 3MTT Program is building a national skills engine designed for scale, equity, and employability that will transform Nigeria’s workforce and position the country as a global hub of digital talent. With nationwide reach powered by AWS and support from the AWS Education Equity Initiative, the program is enabling learners across Nigeria to access high-quality training while laying the groundwork for AI-enabled personalization and job matching. As cohorts grow and capabilities expand, the platform is positioned to connect more young people to opportunity and strengthen Nigeria’s digital economy.

To explore how your educational institution can use the cloud to expand access and transform learning outcomes, visit the AWS Education page.