LAGOS – The Minister of Communication Technology, Dr Omobola Johnson, said on Thursday that the Federal Government had committed nine million dollars (about N1.4 billion) to the Information Technology (IT) Innovation Fund.
Johnson said this at the Demo Africa 2014 in Lagos. The event is an IT programme that tends to promote software innovation.
The event was organised by Lions Africa in collaboration with the ministry.
She said that realising the huge potential of the software industry, the ministry had put in place a set of initiatives that would assist technogy start ups to create successful businesses.
According to her, the role of ICT innovation is increasingly becoming important to the nation, especially in the areas of software, creating knowledge-based societies, jobs and wealth for citizens.
“One of the mandates of the Federal Ministry of Communications Technology is to promote and facilitate the development of the ICT industry in Nigeria.
“And the software industry presents a huge potential for job and wealth creation in Nigeria.
“To catalyse this, the ministry launched a Technology Innovation Programme called the Techlaunchpad in collaboration with the private sector in 2013 to assist Nigerian technology startups (with viable solutions) to grow and develop their products and business for commercial purposes.
“This initiative, which is a public private partnership, is focused on carefully selected tech start-ups who will be provided a training and mentorship programmes through heads of ICT businesses and relevant executives in private sector,” she said.
The minister said that, in addition to assisting the start-ups to build software that met international standards, the programme was also to provide access to funds and markets.
According to her, funds and markets are some of the inhibiting factors to the growth of the local young technology companies.
“Government has committed nine million dollars as seed capital to this fund to be managed by EchoVC and we are literally a month or so away from making our first investment in a number of Nigerian/African tech start ups, [eap_ad_1] “’We are contributing to the development of a robust pipeline of start-ups with our industry focused Techlaunchpad software competitions and our IDEA incubators and accelerators.”
Johnson said that 70 start-ups had been added to the Techlaunchpad initiative and four Information Technology Developers Entrepreneurship Accelerator (IDEA) had emerged finalists for DemoAfrica 2014.
She said that in the next few days, the ministry would be conducting the first launch of the government seeded IT Innovation Fund.
The IDEA Incubation Centre is in Tinapa, near Calabar, the Cross Rivers state capital.
IDEA is a collaboration between the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) and the private sector to facilitate the development of the software industry in Nigeria, through the provision of office space, mentoring, software development and testing tools and support grants. (NAN)
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