Six year old whiz kid Damilare Akano emerges as Africa's youngest Microsoft specialist

SIX year old Nigerian student Master Damilare Akano has emerged as Africa’s youngest Microsoft specialist in the Certiport international certification examination organised to discover the whiz kids of the future.

Akano alongside 200 other students participated in a month-long summer camp tagged Nextgen IT Experts organised by a learning systems institute, New Horizons in Lagos recently. While in camp, the pupils were trained in various information and communication technology (ICT) courses including Microsoft, multimedia, robotics engineering, drone technology, virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, Internet of things and coding, among others.

After the examinations were marked, Akano came top in the Microsoft Office PowerPoint  examinations with a score of 871 out of 1000 points. He was followed by a 10-year-old Masters Toluwalese Kwaku and eight-year-old Master Kolawole Akano, who scored 825 and 800 respectively.

All three of them are pupils of Scholar Crest International, Omole, Lagos. Tim Akano, the managing director of New Horizons, said the achievement of the six-year-old Damilare as Africa’s 2019 youngest Microsoft certified office specialist did not come as a surprise and bears testimony to the excellence for which New Horizons is known.

He added that over the last 14 years, the company has strived to solve one of the major problems confronting corporate Nigeria like shortage of ICT professionals. He said that over 75% of those who work in ICT departments of corporate Nigeria today passed through New Horizons’ training either in the institute’s partnering universities or training centres.