The Federal Government will establish Information Communication Technology (ICT) hubs this year to encourage young ICT entrepreneurs drive their ideas into innovations and money.
The disclosure was made in Abuja yesterday by the Minister of Communication Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, when she fielded questions at a forum of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).
She said the hubs would serve as part of efforts to encourage young Nigerians to go into ICT businesses.
The minister told NAN that there were lots of Nigerians who were into different forms of ICT development, while others actually have ideas that could grow into businesses, but lacked mentorship or funds to translate those ideas into innovations.
Johnson said that the hubs would also serve to bridge that gap between the young ICT entrepreneurs who have wonderful ideas and access to mentorship, certain ICT infrastructures and support infrastructure.
What we are doing in terms of encouraging them is another initiative that we are going to launch hopefully before the end of the year, but if not, early in 2013.
Government has been the catalyst for the creation of innovation hubs in this country.
Now what the innovation hubs are is that they are basically physical locations where young, aspiring ICT entrepreneurs can come if they have an idea that they want to implement through technology
These centres will have very fast bandwidth, they will have testing tools, testing capabilities, they will be working with other young people that have ideas that they can tap into.
More importantly they will have some form of business mentorship because encouraging them is not only encouraging them to develop good software but it’s also ensuring that their ideas and their concepts can make some sense commercially.
So they would have support infrastructure of people that understand marketing, people that understand finance to help them take their ideas from concept all the way to commercialisation.
It’s not like that has not been done, there are a number of innovation hubs around the country but really and truly, for a country the size of Nigeria, for the opportunity that ICT presents to us, we need a number of these innovation hubs.’’