FG Doles N500m for Software Incubation Scheme

Federal Government has announced the commitment of N500 million as part of the $15 million Technology Venture Capital Fund, required to build a local software economy through an incubation programme in the country.

The Lagos E-learning Centre and TInapa Knowledge City in Cross River State are the take off facilities for these incubation centres.

This is part of plans to encourage local software development in the country and the government at the centre said that N500 million would be seeded through the Nigeria Information Technology Development Fund.

Mrs. Omobola Johnson, minister of Communications Technology who spoke at a forum on software incubation added that the government’s seed fund would attract the remaining $12 million from investors.

Besides, Johnson disclosed that as part of the software incubation programme, Lagos and Cross River states have been picked as locations for innovation centres that would drive the country’s software development initiatives

Johnson said the e-Learning Centre would host the software incubation centre in Lagos while Tinapa Knowledge City would house the Cross River state innovation centre.

She explained that rather than the project being government-owned, the innovation centres would be ‘government-inspired’ or ‘government- catalysed’, but would eventually be run by a non profit organisation.

The minister affirmed that the Federal Government would initially provide the enabling environment for the proper take off of the incubation centres and later step aside and allow the centres to have lives of their own.

According to her, the software incubation programme would initially be government-funded with the aim of attracting more investors in the long run.

Johnson said Lagos and Calabar would serve as pilot centres for the scheme, stating that the Lagos Innovation Centre would take off before the end of the year.

“We have chosen two different locations for test pilots. We will deliver Lagos by year end or early next year. Calabar will be delivered by end of the first quarter of 2013,” the minister said.

Programme Manager for the implementation of the software incubation programme, Ms. Helen Anatogo, in her presentation, revealed that the Federal Goverment planned to have established six incubation software incubation centres by the end of 2015.

Some of the potential locations for other software incubation centres, according to her, include Abeokuta, Enugu, Ife and Abuja.

The focus of the software incubation programme and centres, according to her, include enterprise software development, linguistic software, custom programming, mobile software, business intelligence and gaming.

She informed that the centre was targetted at students, startups and software development companies, Anatogo said the programme would offer business and technological training, access to software development tools at no cost, use of facilities and computer resources for development purposes, mentoring, assistance with marketing and promotion, as well as access to finance.