The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) is seeking collaboration with stakeholders including the academia to build a formidable industry that will produce home-grown tech solutions to develop the economy.
Its Director-General, Mallam Kashifu Inuwa, as technology is adopted across the country, people need to build trust using our cyber security, our privacy, and so on. “And how do we govern technology? So what we want to understand, as the policy makers and regulators, we don’t want to be using armchair theory, developing policies and regulations.
“But we want our policies to be a response to the evidence we are getting from this research and the insight we are going to get from you. Then we are also going to look at our compute, our cloud, our platforms, because these are the infrastructure we need to build the digital offerings. Do we have them in our country? How are we leveraging them to accelerate adoption and growth across sectors? Then we are also going to look at how we can use this insight to promote adoption across sectors,” he said his welcome address at the Tech Outlook Summit 2026 held at Oriental Hotel, Lagos.
He stressed the need to also look at access which he said is different from adoption, and adoption is different from productivity.
“Based on the insight we have from the report, especially the healthcare, where we interviewed more than 2,000 Nigerians, more than 80per cent said they want to use digital telemedicine services. But less than 20per cent have ever used telemedicine services in Nigeria.
“So this is a kind of insight that investors, innovators like you need so that you can see opportunity and invest without difficulties. And also for innovators to build real-life solutions that will solve problems for us. And this, we interviewed people from more than 539 healthcare services.
“You all need these solutions. But who are the people building it? What kind of policies do we need to have in place to build it and so on? So we believe at the end of this summit, we’ll have insight around that. And also we need insight on how these services, what these technologies can be used in sectors like the government services and so on, and also the geopolitics and digital sovereignty.
“As a nation, we need to decide. We need to build our own capacity for our digital self-determination. Are we relying on foreign technologies, building solutions for our healthcare systems, for our financial system, and so on? Or are we building it locally? So these are the kinds of things we want to achieve with the Tech Outlook Summit,” Inuwa said.
According to him, at the end, what NITDA wants to achieve is to be able to have document intelligence which it can use it to make decisions. “Because without intelligence, we cannot be able to make policy and investment decisions that will help build a globally competitive ecosystem. At the end also, we want to see how we can achieve synergy between academia and industry.
“Today, mostly, we have good people in academia doing research, but the research ends on the shelf, catching dust. How can we bring them together so that our research will inform industries we are going to build as a nation? And how can we get insight so that our investors will easily identify opportunities where they can invest and build? And our innovators also can easily see problems that need solutions. So this is what we are trying to achieve, and we believe this report will help all of us.
“For the government, it will help us when it comes to policy and regulation. For you, industry, it will help you to understand where we need interventions. Which emerging technologies can we deploy in our country, in which sector? For investors, it will make it easy for them to make decisions on which technology, which sector can they invest to scale.
“For innovators also, they will get insight on what problems, what solutions can they build. So thank you very much for coming, and we look forward to getting more insight from you on how to make it better, because what we believe, no one can succeed in isolation. And to build an ecosystem, we need everyone.
“Everybody has his own role to play. As a government, there are things we can do, and you, the private sector, cannot do it. And there are things you, the private sector, can do, and the government cannot do it,” he said, adding: “But together, we can do greater things.”
