Nigeria is charting a bold and strategic path toward a sustainable digital future anchored on innovation, inclusivity, and resilience — a vision firmly rooted in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda aimed at economic reform, infrastructural advancement, and governance efficiency.
By Chimezie Godfrey
Nigeria is charting a bold and strategic path toward a sustainable digital future anchored on innovation, inclusivity, and resilience — a vision firmly rooted in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda aimed at economic reform, infrastructural advancement, and governance efficiency.
This was the thrust of the keynote address delivered by the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, CCIE, at the Nordic-Nigeria Connect 2025 held in Lagos.
Speaking on the theme, “Nigeria’s Digital Infrastructure Ambition and Path to Sustainability,” Inuwa said Nigeria’s digital transformation goes beyond building data centres or laying fibre-optic cables — it is about “designing and building a new societal fabric, a new economic operating system for Nigeria founded on inclusivity, resilience, security, and digital prosperity.”
He explained that the country’s digital vision is built on two strategic components — the Shared Digital Backbone and the Operational Backbone.
While the Shared Digital Backbone represents the hardware layer — including terrestrial fibre optics, subsea cables, green data centres, and sovereign cloud services that guarantee digital sovereignty — the Operational Backbone forms the software layer, comprising Nigeria’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI): digital identity, payment frameworks, and secure data exchange platforms.
Together, these systems, according to Inuwa, “create a unified national digital ecosystem that empowers startups to develop homegrown solutions tailored to Nigeria’s unique socio-economic context.”
Referencing the recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that disrupted operations across Africa, he underscored the need for digital self-reliance.
“This incident reminds us that relying solely on foreign cloud regions does not ensure business continuity or digital independence. We must build the capacity for digital self-determination,” he asserted.
Inuwa emphasized that achieving Nigeria’s digital ambition demands more than technology — it requires strong, forward-looking policies that encourage innovation while safeguarding consumers.
He outlined Nigeria’s sustainability roadmap built on three key pillars: Policy, People, and Partnerships.
Under the Policy Pillar, he said, Nigeria is creating a predictable, pro-innovation regulatory environment through frameworks such as the Nigeria Startup Act and the Data Protection Act, which together ensure a stable market that protects citizens while promoting growth.
For the People Pillar, he highlighted initiatives like the National Digital Literacy Framework and the Three Million Technical Talent (3MTT) Programme, aimed at equipping Nigerians with the skills to drive and sustain digital innovation.
Under the Partnership Pillar, the DG stressed the importance of strategic international collaboration. “We are moving from ad-hoc relationships to structured partnerships that promote joint ventures, attract investment, and co-develop technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI),” he said.
Inuwa also highlighted transformative projects such as Project BRIDGE, which will expand Nigeria’s terrestrial fibre network to 125,000 kilometres through public-private partnerships, and the National Sovereign Cloud Initiative, designed to strengthen data security within Nigerian jurisdiction.
He further mentioned the Nigeria Stack, which drives nationwide integration of digital identity, payments, and data exchange systems, and the OneGOV platform, aimed at unifying all government services under a single digital interface.
At the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR), Inuwa revealed, Nigeria is advancing applied AI innovations through projects such as the AI Collective and N-ATLAS, the country’s indigenous large language model initiative.
He called for stronger collaboration within Nigeria’s digital ecosystem and deeper engagement with the Nordic region, describing it as “a key ally in Nigeria’s digital journey” that offers technology expertise while benefiting from Nigeria’s youthful innovation capacity.
Reaffirming NITDA’s commitment to digital sovereignty and sustainability, Inuwa declared:
“With clear vision, deliberate strategy, and inclusive policy frameworks, we are confident that Nigeria will not only achieve digital sustainability — we will lead Africa’s digital transformation.”
