World Bank charges Nigeria for rural broadband penetration

The World Bank has tasked Nigeria with ensuring that rural areas are covered by its push for broadband penetration to provide internet access to rural residents.

World Bank country director Shubham Chaudhuri made the call while speaking on the sidelines of the first regional conference on digital economy in Abuja on Tuesday.

The two-day conference is themed: “Positioning West African Digital Economy for the Future”

While Chaudhuri stated that there is huge potential in Nigeria’s digital sector, he added that more reforms are needed in the future.

“The Ministry has also discussed broadband penetration. It is important to ensure that no one is left behind, especially poor families, mostly in rural areas.

“I think the most important thing is how do we ensure that everyone, no matter where they are in Nigeria, has the same access to the digital economy?

“Nigeria’s young population has huge potential, but you need to ensure that there is equal access to broadband penetration.

“In places like Lagos, Abuja there is already a lot of momentum, but what the minister has said is to get that access to the countryside so that every child and young person has that access.

“I think the telecom sector has been very important to Nigeria’s resilience over the past three years,” he said.

He further urged states to work with the federal government and the private sector to invest by building fiber in the areas.

“I urge states to partner with the federal government and make it easy for private companies to lay the fiber for investment.

“Second is digital literacy, especially for the girl child to have access to digital literacy so that they can contribute to areas of growth in the future,” he said.

In his remarks, the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Professor Isa Pantami, stated that by April this year every state would have fiber optic coverage from the federal government.

The minister noted that the price of data in the country has fallen by 70 percent over the past two years, despite rising production costs.

His words: “Starting today, we will provide federal government fiber optic cable to every state. We have it in no less than 34 states and by April of this year it will be available in every state.

“In Nigeria’s national broadband plan, we aim to reduce the price of 1 gigabyte from 1200 to 390 Naira, but as of today, two years before the deadline, the current price of 1 gigabyte is 350.

“The reduction of more than 70 percent is a huge achievement because the price of every other product is rising.

“If you complain about diesel, the ICT sector consumes more diesel than all other sectors.

“We are influenced by the cost of diesel, we are influenced by Forex, but still the price is falling, why? Because we always work harder to make sure we lower production costs.”

Pantami said the Digital Conference became necessary because of the need for the various West African countries to come together and think about how to boost the continent’s economy using information communication technology (ICT).

“If you look at our economic growth, it is lower than our population growth. There are situations where population growth is higher than economic growth.

“This implicitly means that if left unchecked, poverty within that population and in this context within the African continent will continue to increase.

“That is why we feel it is necessary to be proactive in organizing the West African continent so that we can come together and see how we can complement each other.

“This is to ensure that our sub-region is specific and that our continent is very successful overall.” he added.

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