Nigeria targets $1bn public IT spending to drive local cloud growth

"The Federal Government was positioning Nigeria to move from being a major consumer of offshore digital services to becoming a leading cloud computing hub in West Africa." Inuwa Abdullahi DG NITDA.

.... Says "the initiative is anchored on providing regulatory certainty, creating structured demand and developing a sovereign cloud ecosystem capable of serving Nigeria’s population of over 230 million and other countries in the region."

.... Despite the country’s growing demand for digital services, a significant proportion of Nigeria’s computing and digital activities were still hosted on foreign servers.

By Emmanuel Onotevure

Nigeria is seeking to leverage an estimated $1bn annual public sector technology demand to accelerate the development of a domestic cloud computing ecosystem and attract global technology investors.

The Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, disclosed this during a presentation at a workshop on Nigeria’s Digital Infrastructure Opportunity at the ITW Data Cloud Africa 2026 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Abdullahi said the Federal Government was positioning Nigeria to move from being a major consumer of offshore digital services to becoming a leading cloud computing hub in West Africa.

According to him, the initiative is anchored on providing regulatory certainty, creating structured demand and developing a sovereign cloud ecosystem capable of serving Nigeria’s population of over 230 million and other countries in the region.

He noted that despite the country’s growing demand for digital services, a significant proportion of Nigeria’s computing and digital activities were still hosted on foreign servers.

According to him, local data infrastructure is operating at nearly 90 per cent utilisation, forcing businesses and government institutions to rely heavily on offshore resources.

Abdullahi said the Federal Government was deploying its purchasing power to address the infrastructure gap through a newly institutionalised Cloud-First Policy.

He explained that the policy would consolidate fragmented information technology spending across ministries, departments and agencies and position the government as an anchor customer for cloud infrastructure providers.

The NITDA boss disclosed that 326 Federal Government MDAs spent N3.89tn, equivalent to about $2.9bn, on technology investments between 2023 and mid-2026.

He said government technology demand alone accounted for nearly $1bn annually, which the government planned to redirect towards cloud computing and shared digital infrastructure instead of isolated data centres.

Abdullahi also said NITDA was working to eliminate regulatory uncertainty, which had remained a major concern for investors in the digital infrastructure sector.

He said the agency was developing a single-interface regulatory framework to streamline compliance requirements across relevant government institutions.

According to him, the framework will enable regulators, including the Central Bank of Nigeria, to adopt common baseline standards, allowing sectors such as financial services to migrate data to local cloud infrastructure without undergoing multiple and overlapping regulatory approvals.

He added that the approach was aimed at creating a competitive market and encouraging international interoperability rather than imposing rigid data localisation requirements.

Abdullahi said Nigeria’s growing digital population and improving broadband penetration were also strengthening the business case for investment in cloud infrastructure.

He noted that broadband penetration had risen by nearly 10 percentage points to more than 56 per cent, while Nigeria had about 192 million mobile subscribers and 157 million internet users.

The domestic cloud market, he said, is projected to grow from $376m in 2026 to more than $783m by 2031.

Abdullahi added that Nigeria was also targeting the wider West and Central African markets through its National Digital Cloud Policy.

The policy targets $750m in total digital infrastructure investments within two years, beginning with $250m in private capital within the first year.

He said Nigeria intended to harmonise digital infrastructure standards with neighbouring countries to facilitate cross-border data transfers and strengthen Africa’s capacity to host, secure and manage its data locally.

The NITDA boss said the government’s long-term objective was to build an ecosystem capable of supporting private sector innovation while positioning Nigeria as a major regional hub for cloud computing and digital infrastructure.