The Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Malam Kashifu Inuwa, has called on global technology companies and local infrastructure developers to invest in Nigeria’s information technology infrastructure, assuring them of significant returns on their investments.
He said investors should consider the opportunity to help Nigeria transition from a consumer of offshore digital services into West Africa’s premier cloud computing power hub, with the opportunity estimated at more than $1 billion.
Speaking on the government’s ambitious vision for digital infrastructure, Inuwa outlined a broad initiative focused on providing regulatory certainty, creating structured demand and developing a sovereign cloud ecosystem capable of serving more than 230 million citizens and the surrounding region.
Inuwa made the remarks while presenting a paper titled “Nigeria’s Digital Infrastructure Opportunity” at a workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, during ITW Data Cloud Africa 2026.
According to the NITDA Director-General, Nigeria faces a significant economic gap between its massive domestic demand and the fact that much of the country’s computing capacity and digital value is currently routed through foreign servers.
In a statement signed by NITDA’s Director of Corporate Communications, Hajiya Hadiza Umar, Inuwa explained that local data capacity is operating at nearly 90 per cent utilisation, forcing Nigeria to depend heavily on offshore resources.
“To bridge this divide, the federal government is using its immense purchasing power as a catalyst,” Inuwa said.
He explained that under the newly institutionalised “Cloud-First Policy”, Nigeria is consolidating fragmented public-sector IT spending to become a unified anchor customer for infrastructure developers.
Inuwa revealed that between 2023 and mid-2026, 326 federal ministries, departments and agencies spent N3.89 trillion, equivalent to roughly $2.9 billion, on technology investments.
According to him, government demand alone generates nearly $1 billion annually, and officials now plan to direct this spending towards cloud and shared architecture to promote private-sector agility rather than the development of isolated public data centres.
The NITDA boss said the government was also taking steps to strengthen investor confidence by replacing fragmented and unpredictable oversight with a unified regulatory approach.
“To ensure investor confidence, NITDA is replacing fragmented, unpredictable oversight with a unified regulatory approach,” Inuwa said.
He added that the agency is establishing a single-interface portal designed to streamline compliance across multiple government bodies. Through horizontal standards and cross-agency alignment, sector regulators, including the Central Bank of Nigeria, would be able to adopt shared baseline requirements.
“This setup enables financial institutions to migrate core data to local cloud systems seamlessly without navigating redundant regulatory approvals,” he said.
Agency officials emphasised that the framework is designed primarily to create a market rather than extract revenue, with a focus on healthy competition and international interoperability instead of rigid localisation requirements.
Inuwa said the economic fundamentals supporting the initiative were compelling.
“Broadband penetration recently jumped nearly ten percentage points to exceed 56 percent, supported by a population boasting 192 million mobile subscribers and 157 million internet users,” he said.
He added that existing research estimates every dollar invested in Nigerian digital infrastructure generates eight dollars in broader economic returns, while current forecasts indicate that the domestic cloud market could grow from $376 million this year to more than $783 million by 2031.
“Government leaders believe their strategic clarity will accelerate this timeline significantly,” Inuwa stated.
Beyond Nigeria’s domestic market, he said the government’s ambition extends across Central and West Africa.
“Leveraging Nigeria’s geographical position as a natural transit hub for landlocked neighbours, the National Digital Cloud Policy targets $750 million in total digital infrastructure investments within two years,” Inuwa said.
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