By Chimezie Godfrey
The National Information Technology Development Agency has inaugurated a Technical Working Group (TWG) aimed at strengthening regulatory collaboration and advancing a coordinated sandbox framework to support Nigeria’s growing digital economy.
Speaking during the inauguration ceremony, the Director General of NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa, said the initiative was part of ongoing efforts to create a more enabling environment for innovation and digital transformation in the country.
Represented by the Acting Director of Regulation and Compliance, Barrister Emmanuel Edet, the NITDA boss stressed the need for stronger cross-agency collaboration to address structural regulatory challenges affecting innovation.
According to him, members of the Technical Working Group were carefully selected based on their strategic institutional roles and capacity to contribute practical solutions to the evolving realities of Nigeria’s digital ecosystem.
“As government institutions, our core responsibility is to provide solutions to the challenges faced by Nigerians. The issue is not a lack of commitment, but a structural one. Regulators often operate in silos while implementing their mandates, and in today’s digital environment, that model presents significant limitations,” he said.
Inuwa explained that the rapid expansion of the digital economy had continued to outpace traditional regulatory systems, creating gaps capable of delaying or obstructing innovative solutions.
He said the agency was championing a multi-agency regulatory framework designed to foster understanding of overlapping mandates while creating adaptive mechanisms that support innovation without compromising oversight responsibilities.
Central to the framework, according to him, is the adoption of regulatory sandboxes — controlled environments where innovators can test emerging technologies under the supervision of regulators.
“Our guiding principle is that we learn by doing. Through these sandboxes, regulators can contribute to building safe spaces where innovation can be nurtured, tested, and scaled for the benefit of Nigerians,” he added.
The NITDA DG clarified that the initiative was not intended to weaken or override the statutory powers of any agency, but rather to improve coordination and strengthen institutional responsiveness to technological advancement.
He maintained that stronger inter-agency collaboration remained critical to ensuring Nigeria’s competitiveness within the global digital economy.
Inuwa expressed optimism that the Technical Working Group would serve as a strategic platform for shaping forward-looking regulatory solutions while advancing NITDA’s vision of becoming an ecosystem orchestrator for digital transformation and sustainable national development.
Also speaking, the National Coordinator of the Office for Nigerian Digital Innovation, Victoria Fabunmi, presented an overview of the National Regulatory Sandbox initiative.
She explained that the framework was designed to provide a structured, legal and multi-agency platform enabling innovators to test emerging technologies under regulatory supervision before obtaining full market approval.
Fabunmi observed that innovators across sectors such as Artificial Intelligence, fintech, health technology and blockchain continued to face challenges arising from siloed regulations and fragmented approval processes.
According to her, the National Regulatory Sandbox goes beyond being a digital platform, describing it as a governance and legal framework intended to create an enabling environment for responsible innovation.
“Unlike traditional sandbox models often associated primarily with financial services regulation, Nigeria’s approach is intentionally sector-agnostic, allowing regulators from multiple sectors to collaborate in supporting innovative solutions,” she said.
She added that startups and innovators would be able to engage multiple regulators simultaneously within a controlled testing environment, thereby reducing bureaucratic bottlenecks and shortening time-to-market for new technologies.
Fabunmi further stated that the framework would generate evidence-based regulatory insights capable of helping agencies develop adaptive policies for responsible innovation.
The inauguration of the Technical Working Group marks another major step in NITDA’s efforts to build a more agile, collaborative and innovation-friendly regulatory environment aligned with Nigeria’s ambition of becoming a leading digital economy in Africa.
NITDA inaugurates technical working group to deepen regulatory support for digital innovation
