By Progress Godfrey
The Federal Government of Nigeria has unveiled a National Digital Cloud Policy aimed at attracting $750 million in private investment into Nigeria’s cloud and data infrastructure within 24 months.
The policy, unveiled by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, on Monday, is designed to expand local cloud and data centre capacity, create jobs, strengthen indigenous digital capability and position Nigeria as a regional digital services and hosting hub.
Under the policy, government plans to mobilise $250 million in private investment within the first 12 months, with the target rising to $750 million by the end of the second year.
The framework is built around investment and market development, regional digital services exports, government cloud transformation, and digital sovereignty and security, while maintaining an open, competitive, multi-provider cloud market.
Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani, in a statement, said: “Nigeria must move from being primarily a consumer of global cloud infrastructure to becoming a competitive location for the infrastructure, investment, skills and digital services that will define the next phase of the global digital economy.
“Our approach is deliberately open and investment-oriented. We want Nigerian and international providers to invest, build capacity, develop talent and serve both the Nigerian market and the wider African continent from Nigeria. At the same time, Government has a responsibility to ensure that its most sensitive digital assets are governed and secured in a manner consistent with our national interests.
“The National Digital Cloud Policy therefore provides a balanced framework — one that promotes investment and competition, strengthens indigenous capability, modernises Government and applies sovereignty requirements only where they are genuinely necessary.”
He explained that the policy does not impose general data localisation requirements on commercial data. Sovereignty requirements instead apply to defined categories of government and regulated data where national control is considered necessary.
To drive investment, the Minister emphasised that government would aggregate cloud demand from multiple registered providers and provide shared government cloud services, to reduce duplicated expenditure, secure better commercial terms and create predictable demand for private investment.
He added that government would also establish a National Digital Marketplace for coordinated procurement of cloud and digital infrastructure services, alongside dedicated cloud budget arrangements and an anchor-capacity mechanism.
For implementation, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) would provide regulatory oversight, standards and assurance; Galaxy Backbone (GBB) would lead operational delivery, shared infrastructure and aggregation; while the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) would ensure alignment with public procurement requirements.
The federal government said under the 24-month roadmap, the first six months would focus on policy activation, baseline assessments and institutional arrangements. Between six and 12 months, focus would shift to operationalisation of the National Digital Marketplace, to begin priority migration of Ministries, Departments and Agencies, and onboard registered providers, while the subsequent 12 months would focus on scaling migration, expanding capacity, onboarding participating states and accelerating digital service exports.
Tijani noted that the policy also targets increased regional data services through cross-border data flows, regional interconnection and international standards alignment, with the government seeking to enable cloud and data services hosted in Nigeria to serve customers across the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the wider African market.
The policy complements Project BRIDGE, which is designed to deploy at least 90,000 kilometres of additional fibre-optic infrastructure, and the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) Programme, which is developing skills in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and software engineering.
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