Indications have emerged that Nigeria may miss out of the $100trillion booming digitilization if government and the organized private sector fail to collaborate to evolve policy that will enable the country tap into the gains of the fourth industrial revolution.
The World Economic Forum said that the combined value to society and industry of digital transformation across industries could be greater than $100 trillion over the next 10 years.
The Forum also disclosed that the combinatorial ”effects of digital technologies that is mobile, cloud, artificial intelligence, sensors and analytics among others are accelerating progress exponentially, but that the full potential will not be achieved without collaboration between business, policy-makers and NGOs.”
Nigeria’s attempt at digitization is said to be crippled by funding. Last year, a two-day workshop on digitisation held in Lagos to provide opportunity to appraise the process and map out strategies to ensure that the switch over is accomplished with least or no hitches.
The event gave participants the unique opportunity to update themselves on the latest policy direction and technical requirements for the digital transition in Nigeria.
Reviewing the process, Chairman, DigiTeam Nigeria, Edward Idris Amana, enumerated some strategic steps taken in order to realize the digital transition project as mandated by the GE 06 Agreement endorsed by the Member States of ITU at the World Radio Conference in Geneva in 2006.
He noted that the agreement, anticipated new digital plan that involved re-distribution of frequency bands to accommodate new.
Engineer Amana recalled: “Nigeria, like all other Member States of International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Region 1, signed the Geneva 2006 Agreement on Transition from Analogue to Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting.”
However, Nigeria is not yet digitization compliant.
The meeting of business leaders and top government officials held in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland at the weekend said that the “combined value” to society and industry of the digitisation that is already occurring in every industry could generate upwards of $100 trillion over the next 10 years, with society set to gain more than business.
However, this transformation also brings with it risk, according to new research by the World Economic Forum.
According to the research findings, “With digitisation affecting every industry and creating new ways of capturing and creating value, the research, which is part of the Forum’s Digital Transformation of Industries (DTI) project, focuses on the “combinatorial” effects of digital technologies – mobile, cloud, artificial intelligence, sensors and analytics, among others.
