By; SANI ALIYU, Zaria
The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isah Ali Pantami has directed the National Communications Commission (NCC) to come up with research grants for tertiary institutions to enhance research on robotics and emerging technologies.
Pantami gave the directive during the International Conference on Computing and Advances in Information Technology organised by Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria.
The three-day conference which was organised by the Department of Computer Science of the institution, has its theme as, “fostering digital economy through recent trends in information technology’’.
He said the ministry is passionate about supporting emerging technologies in the area of 5G, artificial intelligence, robotics and many more.
According to him, to achieve this, he directed the National Communications Commission (NCC) to come up with research grants that would be given to higher institutions for them to partake on research in emerging technology.
He said the about three weeks ago, there was a meeting to review the proposals sent by the academics in order to see how federal government would support them with research grants in the area of emerging technologies.
Pantami said already there was a research grants under the National Information Technology Development Agency where the federal government sponsor young academics to a higher institutions of learning sometimes abroad.
He said all these initiatives were to support digital economy of the country.
The minister noted that the World Economic Forum (WEF) has said that as at 2016, the global contribution of ICT to economic development stands at 16 per cent and the figure was predicted to reach 50 per cent by 2022.
He added that the world economic forum has also predicted that by 2022, 132m jobs would be created within the digital economy sector.
Pantami said the global economy has been digitalized; new opportunities were coming up particularly with the emergence of the disruptive technology like artificial intelligence, robotics, 5G, quantum computing, virtual realities and many more.
“All these aspect of emerging technologies come-up with new opportunities that makes ICT to dominate the world economy; as it is today, ICT was a key enabler to the growth and development of the world economy,’’ the minister said.
He added that the trend was the same in Nigeria; in 2020 the National Bureau of Statistics said the fastest growing sector of Nigerian economy was the ICT.
“In the first quarter of 2021, the fastest growing economy in the country was ICT, in the second quarter of 2021, the contribution of ICT to Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 17.92 per cent,’’ he said.
He, therefore, attributed the unprecedented ICT’s contribution to GDP on policies of the ministry stressing that within two years the ministry with its agencies came up with 16 national policies.
He added that of the 16 developed national policies more than a dozen were being implemented for instance the `National Digital Economy Policy Strategy for a Digital Nigeria’ which he described as the umbrella policy upon which other policies were developed.
According to the Minister, the ministry is coming up with subsidiary legislations and regulatory instrument to support the development of ICT sector in the country.
In his remarks, Prof Kabiru Bala, Vice-Chancellor, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, said the conference was in line with the university’s efforts aimed at reviving the long standing academic and stakeholders’ engagement.
He added that the academic and stakeholders’ engagement was aimed at boosting awareness creation knowledge sharing and influencing national and international policy formulations.
The vice-chancellor said the international conference on computing and advances in information technology with a theme “fostering digital economy through recent trends in information technology’’ was relevant and timely.
“the digital economy is an economy which operates predominantly with the help of digital technology, It implies the global network of economic activities processes, transactions and interactions among people, businesses and devices among others supported by ICT
“The digital economy permeates the world economy; information was flowing within and across borders with unprecedented volume with significant impact on innovation, trades, global value chain and society; while few aspects of our life remained untouched by digitalization, ‘’ Bala said.
He said emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics and cloud computing among others led to breakthroughs that characterized our world today; this conference is therefore relevant and timely.
