Director General of National Information Development Agency, NITDA, Inuwa Abdullahi, has said there’s need to position Nigerian economy for the fourth industrial revolution.
Speaking at an interactive session with the media on Wednesday in Lagos, he said Nigeria has the two key enablers which include talents and youthful population.
He said; “ The disruption of the global economy orchestrated by the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic is repositioning the digital economies. The digital economy, which is worth $15.5 trillion and equivalent of 15.5% of the global GDP is now the cynosure of all eyes. In recent time, since knowledge economy displaced conventional economy, many nations are striving to be big players in the economy by coming up with innovative ideas capable of ensuring values and prosperity.”
Inuwa explained further that Nigeria is blessed with the three major catalysts that drives the digital economy namely: Connectivity, Data and Youthful population
According to him, “Data plays a huge role in our everyday lives which makes it most valuable and significant asset in attachment of digital economy.
For this reason, we are resolute in protecting data of our populace by coming up with regulations capacity building and public awareness of data management,” he said.
Continuing, he said;” Nigeria is endowed with youthful population that craves for innovations and determined to disrupt existing technologies. At NITDA, empowering this demography of population to come up with top notch ideas remains our priority. They have great roles to play in our aspiration to be global players in the fourth industrial revolution. Hence, our resolve to create enabling environment for them to partake. Of recent, we launched national centre for artificial intelligence and robotics and the national centre for innovation and entrepreneurship with the state-of-the-art facilities for them to co-work on ideas.”
Inuwa stressed that the benefit of digital economy is the opening up opportunities for developing countries for global competitiveness, adding that it remains a simple most important driver of innovation, competitiveness and growth.
He, however, explained that NITDA is set to promote made in Nigeria, adding that the greatest challenge of the startups in the sector is inability to collaborate.
“Any idea that you have someone had thought of it before. If you have an idea, you must commercialize it to make it more impactful. We also do a lot of mentoring to help build capacity for greater efficiency.
“NITDA is also creating awareness in term of advisory to secure our cyber space. There’s need to be conscious of the cyber security.”
In term of training and manpower development, Inuwa said NITDA had trained 425 Data protection officers across 100 MDAs in the country.
