Shittu laments huge ICT deficit in Africa

Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, has attributed greatest challenge to socio-economic development in Africa to huge Information Communication Technology, ICT, infrastructure deficit across various countries on the continent.

Shittu said that the huge deficit has greatly impacted the living conditions and welfare of Africans with various countries initiating policies and programmes to reduce the deficit.

The minister,who was represented by the Permanent Secretary, Arc. Sonny Echono, stated this recently at the Future-Sat Africa Summit 2017, held in Abuja.
He said that most economies across the globe are becoming knowledge-based with the ICT playing a pivotal role as central drivers of the globalization process.
He re-emphasised that the cardinal objective for ICT development in Nigeria was to provide a ubiquitous, robust and cost-effective ICT infrastructure to support the creation of a digital economy, adding that it was in this regard the National ICT Roadmap 2017-2020, has recently been approved by government.

Shittu charged the organizers of the Future-Sat Africa Summit 2017 to “Pay deliberate attention to issues around technology transfer and capacity development”, so that Africa would have a fair share of the business opportunities provided by telecommunication infrastructure development.

The minister described, as timely, the theme for this year’s summit, “Smarter networks”, stressing that the ideas generated from this summit would serve as input into Government various policy review processes, such as the National ICT Policy and the National Broadband strategy review process which will commence before the end of this year.

 Tony Nwakaegho