By Daniel Oluwatobiloba Popoola
The Federal Government has unveiled the National Digital Cloud Policy, targeting $750 million in private investment within 24 months to strengthen Nigeria’s digital sovereignty, expand cloud infrastructure and position the country as a regional hub for digital services.
The Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani, disclosed this in a statement made available to journalists on Tuesday, 18 August, 2026 in Abuja, saying the policy provides a national framework for the growth, governance and internationalisation of Nigeria’s cloud computing and data infrastructure ecosystem.
Tijani said the policy was designed to attract investment, strengthen indigenous digital capabilities, create jobs and expand Nigeria’s digital service exports.
He identified four key priorities of the policy as investment and market development, regional digital services exports, government cloud transformation, and digital sovereignty and security.
According to him, the framework would create a predictable and competitive environment for domestic and international investment in data centres, cloud infrastructure, connectivity and artificial intelligence computing capacity.
The Minister said Nigeria would also 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.
He explained that the policy would maintain an open, competitive and multi-provider cloud market, with sovereignty requirements limited to defined categories of government and regulated data rather than commercial data generally.
To accelerate domestic infrastructure development, Tijani said the government would leverage its collective purchasing power through whole-of-government aggregation, shared cloud services and coordinated procurement.
He added that a National Digital Marketplace would be established to promote transparent procurement, while fiscal, regulatory and investment facilitation measures would be provided for qualifying cloud and data infrastructure projects.
The Minister said the government would support cross-border data flows, regional interconnection, alignment with international standards and export promotion to enable cloud services hosted in Nigeria to serve customers across ECOWAS and the wider African market.
Tijani described cloud and data infrastructure as foundational economic infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence, financial services, digital government, healthcare, education, commerce and other technology-enabled services.
He said Nigeria must transition from being primarily a consumer of global cloud infrastructure to becoming a competitive destination for infrastructure, investment, skills and digital services that would shape the next phase of the global digital economy.
On implementation, Tijani said the National Information Technology Development Agency would oversee regulation, standards and assurance, while Galaxy Backbone would lead operational delivery, shared infrastructure and aggregation.
He added that the Bureau of Public Procurement would ensure compliance with procurement requirements.
The Minister said implementation would follow a 24-month roadmap, with the government targeting $250 million in private investment within 12 months and $750 million within 24 months, alongside increased hosting capacity and digital service exports.
Tijani further said the policy complemented Project BRIDGE and the 3 Million Technical Talent Programme, adding that the ministry would collaborate with relevant stakeholders to accelerate Nigeria’s digital transformation.
