TECHDIGEST – The UK-Nigeria Tech Hub, a pillar of the UK government’s broader Digital Access Program (DAP), has announced a collaboration with Google for Startups, Africa. 

As part of this collaboration, the two entities will award $3 million in Google Cloud credits to women founders in Nigeria. This support will subsidise cloud technology-related costs for startups, allowing them to focus on innovation, customer acquisition, and growth.

The joint effort by UK-Nigeria Tech Hub and Google for Startups Africa will help promote digital inclusion and jointly support technology businesses run by women founders.

 To commemorate International Women’s Day in March, the two organisations co-hosted an event in Lagos, today, bringing together women founders, investors, and ecosystem stakeholders. The event aims to help women founders understand the technology funding landscape and position themselves to secure funding for their startups.

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Country Director, UK-Nigeria Tech Hub, Justina Oha said, “We are thrilled to announce our collaboration with Google for Startups, which comes at a time when the world is celebrating International Women’s Day.

 This partnership is a testament to our commitment to supporting women founders and helping them reach their full potential. Partnerships like this are one of the great ways that stakeholders can come together to advance Nigeria’s tech ecosystem at an accelerated pace.”

Speaking on the collaboration, Head of Startup Ecosystem Google Africa, Folarin Aiyegbusi said: “We are excited to partner with the UK-Nigeria Tech Hub to empower women entrepreneurs in Nigeria. 

This collaboration is a unique opportunity to provide women founders with the support and resources they need to scale their businesses and contribute to the growth of Nigeria’s tech ecosystem.

At Google for Startups, we are committed to supporting startups and entrepreneurs around the world, and we believe that empowering women founders is key to building a more diverse and inclusive tech industry.”

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TECHDIGEST – The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has urged the Nasarawa State Scholarship Board (NSSB) to support the NCC in creating awareness about the intervention projects of the Commission concerning research and digital literacy in order to provide more opportunities for the citizenry.

Director of Digital Economy at the Commission, Dr. Augustine Nwaulune, who hosted a delegation of the Board, led by the Board’s Executive Secretary, Hajia Saadatu Yahya, on behalf of the Executive Vice Chairman of the Commission, Prof. Umar Danbatta, recently, recalled that Nasarawa State is one of the beneficiaries of NCC’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) intervention projects such as the Digital Awareness Programme (DAP) for secondary schools, the Advanced Digital Appreciation Programme for Tertiary Institutions (ADAPTI), the Wireless Cloud, as well as the E-Health programme.

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“While we don’t give scholarship to students, the NCC has continued to give research grants to lecturers and students in the universities, and provided additional opportunities including sponsoring competitions involving students, as well as endowing professorial chairs in universities across the country. In the last seven years, the financial value of the endowments and grants is more than N500 million.

“Therefore, I will appeal to NSSB to create awareness about these initiatives of the NCC among stakeholders in the academia, particularly the research grants to enable stakeholders to leverage such opportunities offered by the Commission to scholars interested in carrying out telecommunications-based research,” he said.

Nwaulune said the NCC has been upbeat in ensuring implementation of the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy (NDEPS), 2020-2030, in which one of its eight pillars, rests on digital literacy, while the Digital Economy Department has been set up and equipped by the Commission with the human resources required to coordinate its programmes in concrete terms.

Yahya, whose delegation visited to discuss areas of collaboration for deepening digital/technical training and skills acquisition in Nasarawa State, commended the Commission for the central role it has played in promoting digital awareness and skills across the country, and pleaded that Nasarawa State should be given more opportunities to  benefit from NCC’s social investments and other digital economy-focused interventions, being the closest State to the Federal Capital Territory, the base of the Commission.

“The purpose of our visit is to seek collaboration with the NCC in whatever ways possible, especially in the areas of scholarship, and ICT skills and literacy for our people. The ICT is, today, the engine room of global economy and we do not want to lag in this new digital order, hence, our decision to seek collaboration with organisations in the ICT space such as yours to work which, especially because you are contiguous to our State,” Yahya, the NSSB Executive Secretary said.

Other members of the delegation, including Senior Special Assistant to Nasarawa State Governor on Information and Communication Technology, Haruna Sani; and the President, Nasarawa State Students Association, Sani Jibrin, spoke in favour of a greater collaboration with the NCC which would add the needed impetus to the current efforts by the state government to leverage ICT for economic development.

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