Nigeria needs more public- private partnership for digital economy, says U. S.

UNITED States Government, yesterday, said that Nigeria needed more international PublicPrivate Partnership to unleash the full potential of its digital economy.

The U. S. Consul- General to Nigeria, Will Stevens, said this during a tech policy speech and insightful fireside chat at the Lagos Business School, Lekki, Lagos.

The theme of the event was “Unleashing Potential: Thriving in the Digital Age.” He said that without partnerships, it would be hard to unleash the talents that could boost the country’s economy.

Stevens said the U. S. government, in its commitment, felt an incredible responsibility to unleash the talents in Nigeria. According to him, it’s a challenge for both the U. S. and Nigeria to figure out how to work together to produce talents, workforce and emerging sets of solutions in the heads of all young people in the country.

Stevens said it was also time to collaborate to find those Nigerian solutions to global problems.

“We need African solutions to global problems. We need to be harnessing the talents, solutions and an ingenuity that’s here on this continent to address some of the huge problems that are facing us around the world,” he said. On how the country has progressed in tech, Stevens said Nigeria was already thriving in the digital age, noting that Information and Communication Technology currently accounted for 22 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product ( GDP)

He added that this was while in the fourth quarter of 2023, oil and gas accounted for less than seven per cent of Nigeria’s GDP.

The U. S. official said that this certainly had impacts on the country’s macroeconomics and monetary policy.

“Nigeria is moving very fast as ICT accounts for three times more than oil and gas, which the country supposedly has in abundance.

“The country’s ICT industry is way ahead of where it was just 10 years ago, and is having a huge impact on the global workforce,” he said.

On digital infrastructure, he said Nigeria had one of the fastest Internet in the continent in Lagos and Akwa Ibom, now that both Meta and Google had landed massive undersea cables in the country.