The Federal Government has reaffirmed its commitment to building a sustainable digital future anchored on innovation, inclusivity, and resilience a central pillar of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda, which seek to reform the economy through technology-driven growth and improved governance.
Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, CCIE, made this known while delivering a keynote address at the NORDIC Nigeria Connect 2025 Conference in Lagos, themed “Nigeria’s Digital Infrastructure Ambition and Path to Sustainability.”
Inuwa said Nigeria’s digital ambition extends far beyond infrastructure development, explained that it represented a transformative vision to design a new economic operating system founded on inclusivity, security, and digital prosperity.
He stated that Nigeria’s digital framework is built on two core elements the Shared Digital Backbone and the Operational Backbone. The Shared Digital Backbone represents the hardware layer, including terrestrial fibre optics, subsea cables, green data centres, and sovereign cloud infrastructure that secure Nigeria’s data. The Operational Backbone forms the software layer, encompassing Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) such as digital identity, payment systems, and secure data exchange platforms.
Together, these backbones form a unified national digital ecosystem that empowers startups to create homegrown solutions for Nigeria’s socio-economic needs.
Citing the recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) global outage that disrupted digital operations across several African countries, Inuwa stressed the importance of digital independence and resilience.
“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.
He said achieving digital sustainability requires a blend of policy reform, human capital development, and partnerships, which he described as the three foundational pillars of Nigeria’s digital strategy. Under the Policy Pillar, he highlighted the Nigeria Startup Act and the Data Protection Act as instruments providing a predictable and innovation-friendly regulatory environment.
Through the People Pillar, initiatives such as the National Digital Literacy Framework and the Three Million Technical Talent (3MTT) Programme are empowering citizens with skills to drive Nigeria’s tech ecosystem. On the Partnership Pillar, Inuwa emphasised structured collaborations that attract investment and promote co-development of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI).
He revealed that major projects such as Project BRIDGE are expanding Nigeria’s terrestrial fibre network to 125,000 kilometres through public-private partnerships, while the National Sovereign Cloud Initiative enhances data security and promotes local cloud hosting. He also said the Nigeria Stack and the OneGOV platform are being developed to integrate identity, payment, and service delivery systems under a single digital framework.
Inuwa further cited the work of the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR), which is spearheading applied AI innovation through initiatives like the AI Collective and N-ATLAS, Nigeria’s indigenous large language model project.
He called for stronger collaboration between public and private sectors, and with global partners, particularly from the Nordic region, to accelerate the nation’s digital transformation.
“With a clear vision, deliberate strategy, and inclusive policy framework, Nigeria will not only achieve digital sustainability we will lead Africa’s digital transformation,” Inuwa declared.
