The Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, has reaffirmed Nigeria’s commitment to building a sustainable and inclusive digital future anchored on innovation, resilience, and digital sovereignty.
Inuwa stated this while delivering a keynote address at the NORDIC Nigeria Connect 2025 held in Lagos, themed “Nigeria’s Digital Infrastructure Ambition and Path to Sustainability.”
He noted that the country’s digital vision aligns with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda, which prioritises economic reform, infrastructure development, diversification through digitalisation, and improved governance for efficient service delivery.
According to the NITDA boss, Nigeria’s digital ambition goes beyond constructing data centres and laying fibre-optic cables; it entails designing a new societal and economic framework based on inclusivity, security, and digital prosperity.
He explained that the vision is anchored on two critical components, the Shared Digital Backbone and the Operational Backbone.
While the Shared Digital Backbone encompasses physical infrastructure such as fibre optics, green data centres, and sovereign cloud services, the Operational Backbone represents Nigeria’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), comprising interoperable systems like digital identity, payment frameworks, and secure data exchange platforms.
“These elements together form a unified national digital ecosystem that empowers startups to create homegrown solutions tailored to Nigeria’s socio-economic realities,” he said.
Citing the recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) global outage that affected several African countries, Inuwa emphasised the need for digital independence.
“This incident reminds us that relying solely on foreign cloud regions does not ensure business continuity or digital self-determination,” he warned.
Inuwa highlighted three pillars guiding Nigeria’s digital sustainability agenda — Policy, People, and Partnerships.
Under the Policy Pillar, he noted that the government is fostering a predictable regulatory environment through instruments such as the Nigeria Startup Act and Data Protection Act, which balance innovation with consumer protection.
For the People Pillar, he said initiatives like the National Digital Literacy Framework and the Three Million Technical Talent (3MTT) Programme aim to build a talent pipeline capable of driving the nation’s digital transformation.
On Partnerships, Inuwa underscored the importance of global collaboration, stating that Nigeria is shifting from ad hoc relationships to structured partnerships that promote joint ventures, attract investment, and co-develop emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI).
He revealed that projects such as Project BRIDGE, which is expanding Nigeria’s fibre network to 125,000 kilometres through public-private partnerships, and the National Sovereign Cloud Initiative, designed to strengthen local data storage capacity, are already advancing the country’s digital ambitions.
In addition, initiatives like the Nigeria Stack, which integrates digital identity, payments, and data exchange, and the OneGOV platform, which aims to unify government services under a single digital window, are key milestones in building an integrated national digital infrastructure.
At the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR), Inuwa said the agency is advancing applied AI innovation through projects such as the AI Collective and N-ATLAS, Nigeria’s indigenous large language model.
He called for stronger collaboration within Nigeria’s digital ecosystem and deeper engagement with international partners, particularly the Nordic region, noting that the synergy between Nordic technology expertise and Nigeria’s creative talent could yield mutual benefits.
Inuwa reaffirmed that Nigeria’s digital transformation is anchored on three pillars — robust infrastructure, skilled human capital, and strategic partnerships — and expressed confidence in the nation’s trajectory.
“With clear vision, deliberate strategy, and inclusive policy frameworks, we are confident that Nigeria will not only achieve digital sustainability but will lead Africa’s digital transformation,” he declared.
