Over N500 million has been pledged by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to Nigerian universities and other tertiary institutions around the nation to support research and innovations that would advance the country’s telecommunications sector.
At a two-day regional roundtable with academia, industry, and other stakeholders that ended at the weekend in Kano, Prof. Umar Danbatta, executive vice chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, revealed this. He said the funds have been committed to research grants to universities and tertiary institutions, including professorial chairs in the universities in important areas to spur technological development.
Danbatta stated that the Federal Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy’s policy toward achieving indigenous technology for our nation’s sustainable development is relevant to the Commission’s current focus on assisting academia in the commercialization of the prototypes from these ground-breaking researches. He claimed that the purpose of the Commission’s roundtable was to give local telecoms innovations, which NCC has been funding, the essential platform to encourage commercialization.
The Commission works with academia to maximize tertiary institutions’ contributions to innovations and the long-term growth of the information and communications technology (ICT) sector because funding is essential to the potential success of these initiatives. said Danbatta.
According to Danbatta, these initiatives have allowed the Commission to support national initiatives to assure overall sector growth and generate wealth for inventors, both of which are essential to the goal of the NCC’s R&D-oriented programs.
Based on them, he claimed that the industry needs concepts, innovations, and advancements from academia in order to increase production and efficiency.
Since the Commission revived research grants for telecommunications-based research innovations from Nigerian academics, focusing on the successful commercialization of locally developed solutions to foster and deepen the uptake of indigenous technology by Nigerians, Danbatta claimed that appreciable impacts had been achieved.
Engr Ubale Maska, the NCC’s Executive Commissioner for Technical Services, also revealed that the organization has so far given academic institutions 49 telecom-based research grants, of which 10 have been successfully turned into working prototypes and showcased to industry stakeholders. He claimed that the Commission’s research and development efforts were focused on advancing Indigenous Content Development and Adoption, one of the eight points of Pillar Eight of the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy (NDEPS), 2020–2030.
