DG Pleads For Startup Growth Drive 

The Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa, has stressed the need for a union to drive the growth of the startup ecosystem in Nigeria.
Inuwa stated this via a statement by the Agency’s Spokesperson, Hadiza Umar, and made available to the The Tide’s source in Port Harcourt recently.
It was further learnt that the statement was made  during a dinner meeting with some key stakeholders of Lagos Ecosystem, including representatives from Microsoft, MasterCard, Norebase, among others.
Reiterating NITDA’s commitment to giving the ecosystem the needed support to boost the sector’s contribution to the economy and strengthen the value chain, he stressed the need to build trust between the government and the ecosystem.
He also emphasised the need for collaboration to drive innovation and overcome existing issues around investments, partnerships, commercialisation of innovations, enabling policies, and acquisition of relevant skills, as well as training.
The NITDA DG also explained  that the Start-up Bill would deal with the bottlenecks and fast-track the anticipated growth of the ecosystem.
He added that the Code of Practice for Interactive Platforms would engender appropriate monitoring to enforce compliance with established regulations guiding the sector.
“We need to decide what and what the right regulations are so that every startup and industry player would have a Code of Practice that works for everyone and is adhered to the latter. Also, I think we need to form a union for Startup Ecosystem”, he said.