Johnson, ICT Minister Launches iDEA

Mrs.  Omobola Johnson, minister of Communication Technology at the weekend launched the National ICT Incubation Programme tagged Information Technology Developers Entrepreneurship Accelerator (iDEA).

She emphasized that iDEA is to support Nigerian ICT Entrepreneurs create successful businesses by  offering support to promising ICT entrepreneurs through ICT incubation centres that will be established in a selected number of cities.

The second centre will be launched soon in Calabar and the minister said that while these centres are being initially established and funded by government through the National Information Technology Development Fund (NITDEVF), they will subsequently be funded and managed independent of government through iDEA under the guidance and supervision of the Governing Council which was inaugurated earlier in February.

The minister at the launch stressed that the primary goal of the iDEA Incubation Centre is to create 25 successful ICT businesses by 2015 and catalyse the ICT Industry by helping Nigerian ICT Entrepreneurs create successful businesses.

She added that the centre will also support the interactions between software entrepreneurs/start-ups and their partners, thus developing indigenous skills and capabilities. It will also act as hubs of innovation that support the development and maturity of a local software economy.

The IDEA centre she added will provide incubates business and technical training, access to software development tools at no cost, use of facilities and computing resources for development purposes, mentoring, assistance with marketing and promotion and access to finance.

On the sustainability of Idea, Mrs. Johnson stressed that ‘’Our IT Incubation Centre journey started in 2011 when we constituted an IT Incubation Committee comprising of mostly private sector and government constituted to develop Incubation operational blueprint. – In February, we inaugurated the Governing Board of the program (iDEA), comprising of industry players and experts with Mr. Dotun Sulaiman as chairman. This is a right direction for us to take to ensure sustainability of this programme’’

On access to funding, the Minister disclosed that ‘’We are setting up a venture capital fund in conjunction with private equity investors to be solely focused on ICT businesses. Initial and final close of $15m and US30m respectively with N500m/$3.5m Seed Capital secured from NITDEVF; while the remaining fund will be sourced through private equity.

She added that a fund manager has been selected to manage the Fund and disbursements will commence April 2013.

She expressed appreciation to the Incubation Committee members who assisted in defining the Incubation framework and blueprint and the Implementation Committee who defined the implementation plan and the governance structure.

In his comments,Dr Henry Akpan, permanent secretary of the Ministry emphasised that the Incubation programme is an initiative of the Ministry which started since the inception of the Ministry in 2011 and was tenderly midwifed in collaboration with National Information Technology Development Agency and the private sector.

Dr Akpan added that there are rigorous planning, thinking-through and extensive collaborations both locally and overseas that have been infused into the Incubation program to ensure that the right model that can deliver same value as other international incubation centres is launched.

He concluded that ‘’the launch marks the beginning of a new era in the history of our software industry- a new dawn of hope for our software entrepreneurs and start-ups to grow their creative ideas to fruition through the iDEA program.

Through the active participation of the private sector in this programme, it is our firm believe that this will not only ensure sustainability of the centre but also bring to bear access to a wide range of expertise from both local and global ICT companies that can shape the outcome of the products from these centers’’