The Federal Government has inaugurated a National Digital Cloud Policy to drive investment, digital sovereignty and transformation of government services.
The Minister of communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani, said this in a statement made available to newsmen on Tuesday in Abuja.
Tijani said the policy provided a national framework for the growth, governance, and internationalization of Nigeria’s cloud computing and data infrastructure ecosystem.
He said it was aimed at positioning Nigeria as a regional digital services and hosting hub, attracting investment, strengthening indigenous digital capabilities, creating jobs, and expanding digital service exports.
According to him, the policy has four key priorities: investment and market development, regional digital services exports, government cloud transformation, and digital sovereignty and security.
Tijani said the policy would create a predictable and competitive environment for domestic and international investment in data centres, cloud infrastructure, connectivity, and artificial intelligence (AI) computing capacity.
He said Nigeria would be positioned as a hosting, processing and interconnection hub for West Africa and the wider Sub-Saharan African market, while the government would strengthen its Cloud First approach across Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).
He said the policy would maintain an open, competitive and multi-provider cloud market, with sovereignty requirements narrowly applied to defined categories of government and regulated data rather than commercial data generally.
The minister said that the government would leverage its collective purchasing power to accelerate domestic infrastructure investment through whole-of-government aggregation, shared cloud services and coordinated procurement.
He added that a National Digital Marketplace would also be established to support transparent procurement, while fiscal, regulatory, and investment facilitation measures would be provided for qualifying cloud and data infrastructure projects.
Tijani said the government would support cross-border data flow, regional interconnection, international standards alignment, and export promotion to enable cloud services hosted in Nigeria to serve customers across ECOWAS and the wider African market.
He described cloud and data infrastructure as foundational economic infrastructure underpinning AI, financial services, digital government, healthcare, education, commerce and other technology-enabled services.
“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,” he said.
The minister said the policy assigned NITDA regulatory oversight, standards and assurance, while Galaxy Backbone would lead operational delivery, shared infrastructure, and aggregation, with the Bureau of Public Procurement ensuring compliance with procurement requirements.
He said implementation would follow a 24-month roadmap, with the government targeting 250 million dollars in private investment within 12 months and 750 million dollars within 24 months, alongside increased hosting capacity and digital service exports.
Tijani said the policy complemented Project BRIDGE and the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) Programme, adding that the ministry would collaborate with relevant stakeholders to accelerate Nigeria’s digital transformation.
