NITDA, LBS Developing Model For Increased Govt Incentives For Startups – Kashifu
TECHDIGEST – The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) and the Lagos Business School (LBS) are jointly working on developing all existing government incentives and introduce startups to existing government policies and programmes that will benefit the ecosystem.
Inuwa Kashifu Abdullahi, director general of NITDA was speaking on NITDA’s effort on addressing skills set in the country, during an interactive session organised by the Agency in Lagos on Tuesday themed: Fostering an Enabling Environment for Start-up Growth.
“As honourable minister of Communications and Digital Economy normally used to say “we make skills not certificate” because we sponsor people abroad for MSC and PHD programmes, most of them refused to come back to the country, those that come back will be a liability to the country looking for jobs.
Read Also:
“Instead of that, why not build skills to create jobs? Then honourable minister directed we should come up with scheme called Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Support scheme. It is a scheme design to identify talented startups of youths with ideas, place them in developed hubs for training and incubation and at the end we have what we called startups Vouchers we give them that will help them as seed funding to develop their products and services”.
The NITDA boss said they “started last year and we still have challenges and this is the reason why we are here today to talk with you to see how we can make it better.
“We have also conceptualised another idea called HiFiV which we want to go to universities, set up centres for excellence for entrepreneurial capacity building that will help develop entrepreneurship as well as help our students right from the universities to start thinking of starting their own business.
“We are partnering with Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on this and starting with six universities across the six geopolitical zones and we are talking with CBN to see if they can build a centre in each state that will help to address that.
“On funding, we realized that there are some many funding and incentives but mostly you don’t know them because there is a disconnection between the government and the ecosystem. So, we are working with Lagos Business School to develop all existing government incentives which we are going to socialised with you to see how you can benefit from it.”
Source: Techeconomy
 and the Lagos Business School (LBS) are jointly working){kind=link}