GITEX approaches NITDA to promote Nigeria’s ICTs services

The Dubai World Trade Centre has announced plans to attract foreign investment from around the world into Nigeria’s information technology sector. This is in a bid to encourage Nigerian companies do more business with the outside world in terms of software development recently.
Director of exhibition and event management, Dubai World Trade Centre, Bilal Al-Rais, dropped the hint while briefing the acting director-general of the National Information Development Agency (NITDA) Dr. Ashiru Sani Daura on the 2014 GITEX Technology Week scheduled for October 12th -16th, 2014 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Al-Rais disclosed that the Dubai World Trade Centre intends to put Nigeria on the map of technology development while encouraging investors to introduce incubation programme in the country.
According to him, the Trade Centre would identify software and incubating companies from Nigeria and showcase them to the outside world during the GITEX Technology Week, adding that the centre has opportunities for about 20 Nigerian companies at the show.
‘’Our main objective is to encourage Nigerian companies do more business and for the outside world to know what is happening in Nigeria in terms of software development. We want to have more collaborative effort with the Nigerian government/ NITDA to bring together businessmen from Nigeria to do more in the Middle East and Africa through Gitex Technology. We had over 24,000 visitors from Africa last year and we are looking forward to increasing that figure to bring in more buyers from sub Saharan Africa into Gitex,’’ he said.
The event would also provide opportunity to find out the most innovative student coming out from the Nigerian universities under the Student Lab Competition in partnership with Google and sponsored by the Ministry of Presidential Affairs of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The initiative is to identify the most individual student project across Middle East, Africa, Asia and India, to find out whether there is any great project coming out from innovation point of view from post graduate students and graduate students in technology development.”
GITEX Technology Week is one of the longest lasting events in the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia and has more than 4000 participating companies.
In his response, the Acting DG of NITDA, represented by a director, Dr Vincent Olatunji, said that Nigeriacould earn more revenue from ICT than from oil. According to him, Nigeria has a huge market in Africa and greatest return on investment.
The DG informed that NITDA would participate at the GITEX show and would showcase young innovators to the world in order to make a bold statement.“A lot is going on in Nigeria in the areas of software and hardware development and services, we need to showcase to the international community what is coming out from Nigeria,” he added.