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The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has assessed and cleared 62 IT related projects worth 1,168,145,213,150 naira between January and May this year.
The agency is Nigeria’s government clearinghouse for all IT projects by public establishments including ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs). Clearance for IT procurement by all MDAs is part of NITDA’s statutory mandate.
The Director-General of NITDA, Mallam Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, said that the quantum of IT project clearance is an Indication of the drive by President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to digitalise government services as most of the projects are service based.
Abdullahi was speaking at a virtual meeting organised by a subsidiary of the agency, Office for Nigerian Content development (ONC). The meeting focused on “Harnessing indigenous solutions for public sector innovation and digital development.” He was represented at the virtual meeting by the Director of IT Infrastructure Solutions, Dr Usman Gambo Abdullahi,
He said the assessment shows that about 64,878,725,488 naira were for software and software enabled projects. This has shown that more can be achieved with a deeper collaboration between the public and private sector going forward using technology as a driver for public services, he added while analysing the impact of NITDA’s IT clearance efforts.
His words: Therefore, for successful development and delivery of government digital services, it is significantly important that innovative Nigerian companies are engaged very early in the project from the conceptualization and design stages.”
He added that the effect of the pandemic on the economy, governance and public service delivery has spurred a greater urgency for the development of government digital services and digital economy for Nigeria.
He said NITDA will soon issue frameworks for the development of government digital services, and public-private sector partnership in its products as there is an urgent need for government to accelerate the delivery of government digital services for the benefit of Nigerians.
While elaborating on the benefits of collaborations and partnerships between the public and private sector, Abdullahi stressed this will deepen the opportunity for learning to create tailor-made solutions for societal problems.
“Our key objective is that for solutions that are driven or adopted by the federal government, we want to encourage that beyond issuing out procurement notices and adverts, the MDAs will be able to sit down with indigenous content providers to discuss and come up with a plan or strategy to drive the development of the solution,” said the Coordinator of ONC, Barrister Kassim Sodangi.
Sodangi added that indigenous content development and adaptation, which is the pillar the ONC operates under, is a central pillar of digital economy in Nigeria. He reiterated that the mandate of the ONC is to ensure that local capacity is built, adopted and used as a central plan for the development of digital economy in Nigeria.
According to him, the ONC will be going through the public Procurement Act, explore the presidential executive Order 003 and 005 for planning and execution of projects and promotion of Nigerian content in contracts, science, engineering and technology. These documents will form the fulcrum for discussing a laboratory of what can happen and what are the opportunities in the bylaw and policy that will drive the development of co-creation and co-planning of projects.
“Our pitch to you MDAs here present is that you will explore the frameworks policy and laws available so that we can ideate together, we can design programs together, so that we can deliver these programs together as one entity,” Sodangi added.
“The essence of the virtual meeting was to co-ideate and co-develop solutions that are indigenous to Nigeria, able to solve specific and precise problems in our society,” said Sodangi as while describing the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy document as a vanguard document for harnessing digital economy in Nigeria.
“This strategy contains eight pillars: They are; developmental regulation, digital literacy and skills, solid infrastructure service, infrastructure promotion of digital services, digital Society and emerging technologies and indigenous content development,” said the ONC coordinator.
