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Nigeria is on track to complete a 90,000 km fiber optic cable network in three years, a government minister said, beating an initial timeline for the project backed by the World Bank and the African Development Bank.
Digital economy and communications minister Bosun Tijani said the $2 billion project, which was initially set to take five years, is at the core of Nigeria’s plan to connect 40 million people without internet access. The installation of 3,700 telecommunications towers, another key element of the digital connectivity roadmap, will finish in the next two years, he added.
“What we do not have is meaningful connectivity, the sort of connectivity that you truly need to be able to benefit from the sort of innovation that we’re seeing,” Tijani said at Semafor’s The Next 3 Billion in New York on Tuesday.
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Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and a growing market for digital technologies. But gaps in internet access mean more infrastructure investment is required to ensure most of its 220 million people can get online.
There is also a usage gap: A report by the Partnership for Digital Access in Africa, a non-profit aimed at driving up internet connectivity, and global telecom association GSMA estimates that more than half of the country’s population live in areas with internet coverage, but do not use it.
Nigeria unveiled its AI strategy document last year, aiming to harness the technology to help create a trillion-dollar economy by 2030. But the country needs to develop local capacity and change how it stores data to avoid getting left behind, the minister said.
“If we truly want AI to be inclusive — even before we start talking about compute — we have to ensure that most countries’ realities are digitized,” Tijani said. “The starting point for a country like ours is to invest in talent.”