Nigeria is moving to convert its enormous public sector IT budget into the anchor investment for a homegrown cloud computing industry, with officials framing the country as West Africa’s next major digital infrastructure hub. Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, laid out the strategy while presenting at a workshop titled “Nigeria’s Digital Infrastructure Opportunity,” held during ITW Data Cloud Africa 2026.
Inuwa said the plan responds to a stark imbalance: even though demand for digital services within Nigeria is enormous, most of the value from that demand currently flows to servers hosted abroad. He noted that local data capacity is already running at close to 90 percent utilisation, a level that has pushed the country to depend heavily on offshore providers to keep up. The government’s answer is to use its own scale as leverage, consolidating what has historically been scattered IT spending across federal agencies into a single, coordinated source of demand for local infrastructure builders under a newly formalised Cloud-First Policy.
The numbers behind that leverage are substantial. Between 2023 and mid-2026, 326 federal ministries, departments and agencies spent a combined 3.89 trillion naira, about 2.9 billion dollars, on technology. Inuwa said government spending alone now generates close to 1 billion dollars in demand every year, funds officials intend to steer toward shared cloud architecture rather than scattered, standalone data centres, with the aim of giving the private sector more room to build and compete.
To make that shift attractive to investors, NITDA is also overhauling how the sector is regulated. Inuwa described plans for a single-interface portal designed to simplify compliance across the various government bodies that currently oversee different parts of the digital economy. The approach relies on horizontal standards that allow sector-specific regulators, including the Central Bank of Nigeria, to work from shared baseline requirements. In practice, officials said, that would let banks and other financial institutions move core data onto local cloud systems without having to seek separate approvals from multiple regulators. Agency officials were emphatic that the framework is built to expand the market rather than to raise revenue, and that it favours open competition and interoperability over strict data localisation rules.
Inuwa argued the underlying economics support the government’s confidence. Broadband penetration has climbed by nearly ten percentage points to surpass 56 percent, in a country with 192 million mobile subscribers and 157 million internet users. Citing existing research, he said every dollar invested in Nigeria’s digital infrastructure generates eight dollars in wider economic returns. Current projections put the domestic cloud market at 376 million dollars this year, rising to more than 783 million dollars by 2031, a timeline Inuwa suggested the government’s new policy clarity could help accelerate.
The ambitions reach beyond Nigeria’s own market. The National Digital Cloud Policy sets a target of 750 million dollars in total digital infrastructure investment across Central and West Africa within two years, beginning with 250 million dollars in private capital in the first year alone. Officials are pointing to Nigeria’s position as a natural transit point for landlocked neighbouring countries as a strategic advantage, and say harmonising digital standards with partner states could open the door to cross-border data transfer frameworks, allowing African nations greater control over where and how their data is hosted, secured and scaled.
