The Federal Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, has directed the National Communications Commission (NCC), to provide grants for tertiary institutions to enhance research on robotics and emerging technologies.
The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isah Pantami, disclosed this during the International Conference on Computing and Advances in Information Technology, organised by Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria on Tuesday.
The three-day conference, theme “Fostering Digital Economy Through Recent Trends in Information Technology’’ was organised by the Department of Computer Science of the institution
Pantami said the ministry was passionate about supporting emerging technologies in the area of artificial intelligence, robotics and many more.
To achieve this, the minister said he directed the NCC to come up with research grants that would be given to higher institutions to partake on research in emerging technology.
He said there was a meeting about three weeks ago to review proposals sent by academics in order to see how the Federal Government would support them with research grants in the area of emerging technologies.
According to Pantami, there is a research grant under the National Information Technology Development Agency, where the Federal Government sponsors young academics to higher institutions abroad.
He said all these initiatives were to support the digital economy of the country.
The minister noted that according to the world economic forum, as at 2016, the global contributions of ICT to economic development stands at 16 per cent, and the figure has been predicted to reach 50 per cent by 2022.
He added that the world economic forum had also predicted that by 2022, 132 million jobs would be created within the digital economy sector.
“All these aspects of emerging technologies come up with new opportunities that make ICT to dominate the world economy; as it is today, ICT was a key enabler to the growth and development of the world economy,’’ the minister said.
“In the first quarter of 2021, the fastest growing economy in the country was ICT, in the second quarter of 2021, the contribution of ICT to Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 17.92 per cent,’’ he added.
Pantami therefore, attributed the unprecedented ICT’s contribution to GDP on policies of the ministry, stressing that within two years the ministry with its agencies came up with 16 national policies.
He added that of the 16 developed national policies, more than a dozen were being implemented, like the `National Digital Economy Policy Strategy for a Digital Nigeria”, which he described as the umbrella policy upon which other policies were developed.
The Minister said the ministry was coming up with subsidiary legislation and regulatory instruments to support the development of ICT sector in the country.
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