The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has pledged to adopt global best practices to accelerate Nigeria’s digital transformation and strengthen its governance framework.
The commitment was disclosed by Lukman Lamid, Special Assistant to the NITDA Director General on Innovation and Research, at the closing ceremony of the 18th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV 2025) in Abuja.
According to Lamid, the agency plans to leverage outcomes from the conference to enhance existing policy frameworks, expand broadband infrastructure, and strengthen digital public infrastructure.
“Having gathered experts and stakeholders from around the world for five days to develop research-based recommendations that can shape the future of digital governance is a major achievement. We at NITDA are committed to implementing some of these recommendations and best practices to ensure real impact on Nigeria’s digital economy,” he said.
Lamid said: “We are building digital public infrastructure in Nigeria and working to strengthen broadband access. The Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy is rolling out a 95,000-kilometre fibre optic project by 2027. This will ensure last-mile connectivity and broaden internet access, which will, in turn, stimulate economic growth.”
The Director of UNU-EGOV, Delphine Soares commended Nigeria’s progress, noting that the country has become an active contributor to global digital governance discussions.
“We have been in contact and cooperating with Nigeria for a long time. Through these interactions, I could understand the priority that the country has given to this topic. Here, in the multiple discussions, and as you heard at the closing ceremony, we received a lot of papers from authors from Nigeria. It is very clear, not just for me, I think for all the community now, the developments that the country is doing in this area,” she said.
Prof. Kure Sadegu Egaojo, Programme Chair for ICEGOV 2025 and Canada Research Chair in Governance and AI at Caltech University, urged the Nigerian government to adopt and implement recommendations from the conference to improve governance.
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“ICEGOV being hosted in Nigeria brings the conversation to this country and indicates our readiness to be part of the global discourse on the use of technologies, particularly emerging technologies like AI, in transforming the way government works. My hope is that the government does not only provide a platform but is also able to benefit from some of the ideas that we discussed and look at ways of implementing them within the realities of our own country, Nigeria,” he said.
Tomasz Jelowski of Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland, highlighted the importance of the conference in connecting researchers and policymakers and called for more collaborations between African countries on digital governance research.
“The most important impact is connecting the researchers from Nigeria with researchers from other countries in the global north and in the global south. So far we see little collaboration between countries in Africa on digital government research. I very much hope that ICEGOV can contribute to changing this state of affairs,” he said.
The global conference, themed “Shaping the Future of Digital Governance through Cooperation, Innovation, and Inclusion,” brought together 508 participants, including 369 delegates, 308 authors, and 102 international participants from 51 countries.
The closing ceremony also celebrated ICEGOV’s Best Paper Awards, recognising cutting-edge research from both established institutions and national practitioners.
In the Ongoing Research category, the paper “Time and Complexity in Public Procurement of Digital Solutions: Evidence from Italian Municipalities” by Tommaso Giaccardi and Luca Gastaldi (Politecnico di Milano) won, demonstrating the conference’s appreciation for empirical work addressing real-world implementation challenges.
In the Research category, Robert Ifeonu (Central Bank of Nigeria) won for “Micro-Transformation Framework for Public Sector Innovation: Catalysing Resilient, Outcome-Driven Digital Governance.”
Other shortlisted works included Khadijah Mohammed’s study on Nigeria’s mobile banking experience and a multi-author UN DESA study on public service provision in countries in special situations.
