NITDA endows 3 Nigerian tertiary institutions with N6.5m for software devt

By Prince Osuagwu

Three tertiary institutions in the country have received a staggering N6.25 million financial aids from the National Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA, for the development of local software in the country. The Institutions are Abia state Polytechnic Aba, Federal University of Technology Akure and Federal University of Technology, Minna.

NITDA DG, Angaye

NITDA gave the financial aids to redeem two separate promises it made in Calabar, Cross River state, at the Institute of Software Practioners of Nigeria ( ISPON) conference, October last year,  that three lucky tertiary institutions would benefit from its financial endowment for the development of local software in Nigeria.

The endowment, according to NITDA would run for five years.

The institutions, NITDA said, were selected based on their performance during a national software development competition for tertiary institutions held at the conference.

Abia State Polytechnic Aba received the NITDA endowment for being the winner of the Software Design Architecture at the competition. The Federal University of Technology Minna also received a NITDA endowment for Software development excellence conferred on the overall winner at the conference, while NITDA DG’s also gave his personal award for the Best Open Source Software of the Year. The award went to the Federal University of Technology Akure.

While presenting the financial awards to the recipients in Abuja last week, Angaye said the awards were given as part of NITDA’s measures of promoting the growth of the IT sector in the country as well as encouraging IT local content development for wealth creation. 

He also added that the gesture was in continuation of its public-private-partnership model of ensuring that Nigeria becomes a key player in the global IT industry.

Angaye said that “on a personal note, I decided to take up the sponsorship of the Best Open Source Software of the Year award due to my profession as a software practitioner and the need to encourage the discovery of globally competitive critical mass of other software engineers in Nigeria”.

 He noted that no country can develop and compete at the global level at this information age without adequate and sound software base adding that the software industry is no doubt of utmost importance to future competitiveness for economies across the globe especially with its halo effect in creating related business opportunities.

For him, a study of the economic impact of the software industry in Southeast Asia countries has discovered that there was a conservative multiplying economic effect of about 1.7 for upstream and downstream industries.

End-user industries also benefit enormously from reduced cost, increased productivity and increased business opportunities.

Angaye said the target of the stakeholders in the IT sector in Nigeria is to ensure that the sector contributes immensely to the growth of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as compared to the oil and Gas sector in the not too distance future.