Nigeria has a policy problem. Not a shortage of policies — the country produces those in abundance. The problem is that too many of its digital economy decisions have been driven by short-term political cycles and market pressures rather than rigorous, long-term research. Bosun Tijani, the Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, has spent the better part of two years saying this out loud. This weekend, he put ₦12 billion behind the argument.
On Saturday, March 29, the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy formally opened an Expression of Interest for the National Digital Economy Research Clusters — a programme designed to make research and evidence the foundation of how Nigeria designs, implements, and evaluates its digital policy. The fund was first announced in November 2025 at the 18th International Conference on Theory and Practices of Electronic Governance in Abuja. It is now open for bids.
“Today my heart is filled with deep joy as we announce the Expression of Interest for the National Digital Economy Research Clusters,” Tijani said in a statement. “A ₦12bn research funding scheme designed to place ideas, evidence, and research at the centre of Nigeria’s digital transformation.”
What the Programme Actually Is
The National Digital Economy Research Clusters will establish six research clusters, each hosted by a Nigerian university and led by academics working alongside international partners. Up to 36 professors will anchor the clusters, supported by more than 200 researchers — postdoctoral fellows and PhD candidates — generating policy-relevant work across the programme’s lifespan.
The six focus areas map directly onto the structural gaps in Nigeria’s current digital policy architecture: connectivity and meaningful use; digital public infrastructure and government services; digital skills and human capital development; the digital economy and jobs; online trust and consumer protection; and artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.
Each cluster is intended to produce more than journal papers. The explicit mandate is to generate insights that feed back into active policy decisions — informing how broadband is deployed, how digital identity systems are designed, how AI is regulated, and how Nigeria closes its skills gap as automation accelerates.
The programme is funded under Project BRIDGE — the Federal Government’s initiative to deploy 90,000 kilometres of fibre optic backbone infrastructure across the country. That linkage is deliberate. Tijani has consistently argued that infrastructure investment without matching policy intelligence is a waste — that expanding broadband reach means nothing if the policy frameworks governing how it is used remain weak or evidence-free.
“As we deepen our digital infrastructure coverage, thoughtful, evidence-based approaches are required to be deployed in society to ensure everyone benefits from this significant investment,” he said.
The Problem Tijani Is Actually Trying to Solve
Tijani’s framing of the policy problem is the most interesting part of this announcement, and it deserves more attention than it has received.
“Too often, the ideas shaping digital policy come predominantly from markets and political cycles rather than from research, evidence, and long-term thinking,” he said at the ICEGOV conference where the fund was first unveiled in November. That is a pointed diagnosis — one that implicates not just previous administrations but the entire ecosystem of digital governance in developing economies, where donor agendas, vendor interests, and short-tenure ministers routinely shape policy more than independent research does.
Nigeria’s digital economy history bears this out. The country’s broadband penetration targets have been missed repeatedly — not because the targets were wrong, but because they were set without rigorous baseline data or dynamic feedback mechanisms. The Startup Act, which passed in 2022, remains partially unimplemented because the regulatory infrastructure it assumed did not exist. The National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy 2020–2030 reads well but was designed without the kind of longitudinal research that would allow it to course-correct as conditions changed.
The Research Clusters are an attempt to build that correction mechanism — not a one-time study, but a permanent institutional capacity for generating policy-relevant evidence across each critical domain of Nigeria’s digital economy.
Who Can Apply and What They Should Know
Universities and research institutions interested in leading or collaborating within a cluster are invited to review the Terms of Reference released alongside the EOI and submit proposals. Tijani confirmed a press briefing will be held in the coming days to provide additional detail on assessment criteria and timelines.
The programme is structured to accommodate both cluster leads — institutions that anchor a specific research focus — and collaborators that contribute domain expertise or capacity across multiple clusters. International academic partnerships are explicitly encouraged, with each cluster designed to pair Nigerian academic leadership with global institutional knowledge.
Vice-chancellors and heads of research institutions have been directly urged by the minister to engage. This is not a programme designed to sit in a ministry procurement backlog — the EOI structure, the press visibility, and the ministerial ownership all suggest an intent to move quickly.
The Credibility Question
The ₦12 billion figure carries weight. Nigeria’s research institutions have been chronically underfunded — the country’s research and development expenditure as a share of GDP remains well below 0.5 percent, a fraction of the 1 percent African Union target. A dedicated ₦12 billion research fund, if disbursed effectively, would represent a meaningful structural shift in how Nigeria invests in knowledge production.
The caveats are real. This is a government programme in a country with a complex history of announced funds that move slowly from approval to disbursement. The linkage to Project BRIDGE is a structural asset — BRIDGE has World Bank support and is one of the Ministry’s most concrete ongoing deliverables — but it also means the Research Clusters programme is dependent on the broader infrastructure programme maintaining political and financial momentum.
The cluster model itself is proven in other markets. South Korea, Finland, and Rwanda have all used government-anchored research clusters to accelerate digital policy quality. The question for Nigeria is whether the institutional infrastructure — in the universities, in the ministry, and in the feedback loop between researchers and policymakers — exists to make the model work at the pace the programme demands.
What Tijani has done, at minimum, is define the aspiration clearly. “Because nations that lead the future are not simply those that deploy infrastructure; they are the ones that cultivate ideas,” he said. For a minister who has spent three years laying cable, building towers, and negotiating satellites, that framing — infrastructure plus ideas — is the most complete articulation of Nigeria’s digital strategy yet.
The EOI is open. The ₦12 billion is committed. The next question is who walks through the door.
