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Nigeria has secured access to a World Bank’s $500 million funding to support local innovation and entrepreneurship.
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The Minister of Communication, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani, disclosed this at the weekend in Abuja during a dinner event jointly organised by the tech community and the World Bank.
“We’ve got access to about half a billion dollars to start local funding. This funding is aimed at propelling innovation and entrepreneurship within Nigeria’s thriving digital sector,” said Tijani to an audience that included World Bank officials, startups and hub founders, major stakeholders such as telcos and heads of government agencies: Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) and National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA).
“We want to ensure that those businesses that will benefit are true, real Nigerian businesses,” the minister stressed adding that there were already plans to work with the Bank of Industry (BoI) in order to ensure that the funding reached were authentic Nigerian businesses and help to further boost home-grown enterprises.
His words: “Part of my responsibilities is working with BOI to ensure that we domicile that funding locally in Nigeria, work with firms who manage and invest in businesses to ensure that those businesses that will benefit are true, real Nigerian businesses.
“This strategy aims to augment the resources available to support Nigerian innovators. The overarching goal is to harness these funds to attract further investments and broaden the support system for local entrepreneurs.”
World Bank Country Director for Nigeria, Shubham Chaudhuri, assured the ministry of the bank’s support to reduce poverty, support innovation and grow businesses.
He said the bank remains committed to working with the federal government to create new job opportunities and improved living standards for millions of Nigerians.
His words: “Our main mission here in Nigeria is to eliminate poverty, make lives better, and create jobs for all Nigerian youth. One of the areas that we think has the greatest potential is the area of using digital technologies to transform.”
According to Chaudhuri, the World Bank was already working with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) to drive digital identity (ID) inclusion to enable creating digital IDs for at least148 million Nigerians by Q2 of 2024.
This is in addition to its work with the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to speed up rollout of “broadband infrastructure for broadband connectivity” to broaden access to more Nigerians.
