Engr. Inuwa Kashifu Abdullahi, Director General and the Chief Executive Officer of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has stressed the need to encourage the nation’s MSMEs, SMEs, to digitise their services using technology as a source of inspiration to come up with new ways of doing business, that in doing this the MSMEs can increase Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by $53 billion.
He stated this while speaking during a visit to the GIZ/DTC Nigeria office as a special guest at the Techmybiz pitch-a-thon event in Victoria Island.
Techmybiz is an initiative of GIZ/Digital Transformation Center Nigeria (DTC Nigeria), which is jointly funded by the European Union (EU) and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH with NITDA as a key implementing partner.
Abdullahi said that the visit is for the pitch about digital transformation for MSMEs, that doing this will help Nigeria to grow its economy.
He said according to recent research, any MSMEs that transform digitally can increase its revenue by 26 percent and cut cost by 22 percent and that according to statistical research, in 2018 digitally transformed enterprises contributed $13.5 trillion to the global GDP.
He said that it is projected this year that it will reach $53.3 trillion more than 50 percent of the global GDP, that if Nigeria can digitally transformed its MSMEs it can add 26 percent to the nation’s GDP or to the revenue of the MSMEs.
“Today the MSMEs contribute 43 percent to the Nigeria GDP which is about $205billion, so 26 percent of this means $53bn, that means digitalization of our MSMEs can increase our GDP by $53 billion.
Speaking on the visit he said, “I have seen exciting ideas and also the will for the MSMEs to digitalize because digital is everywhere. We used to say technology is an enabler before, but today it is a strategic partner.
“Anything you do, any business you do, you need technology therefore no matter what kind of business you do as MSMEs if you embrace technology, it can help you grow and help you scale up, reduce cost and get more customer loyalty.
He noted that NITDA wants to achieve 95 percent digital literacy by 2030.
“we want every Nigerian to be able to use it’s digital devices to access or consume digital services and the second part of it is that we need to build digital skills.
“we need to train our people and harness our talents to build our digital offering in-country because technology hardly last more than a year. if you develop a system, you have to upgrade it within a year therefore no country will survive on another country to provide digital services for it.
He said every country needs to build in-country skills and build it on digital offering.
“ we started an initiative on training one million developers last year so far we have trained 219,000 Nigerians on different aspects of technology to build our own digital offerings.
“On the area of digital literacy we have trained more that three million Nigerians on digital literacy through various channels, we have the digital platform the NITDA Academy where you can go and learn at your own pace,” he said.
