The Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa, has reiterated the need for Nigeria to build digital trust and implement international standards to support digitisation policies.
Inuwa stated this at a Digital Policy workshop, organised by the British Standards Institution (BSI) in Abuja.
He said the workshop provides an opportunity for NITDA, Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) and the British Government to deepened collaboration in order to enhance digital trust and adoption within Nigeria.
He disclosed that the agency was working hard to build digital trust across boards, in order to reawaken as well as repose confidence in the citizenry who are expected to make use of digital services safely and responsibly.
“To achieve that, we need to have standard and a guideline for building our services and digital offering, and that explains why as part of the Ministry’s target set for NITDA, which was to develop standard for the Nigerian Digital Public Infrastructure, we need international collaboration to get the job done.
“We also need to build a system that can scale beyond Nigeria where our solutions would be indigenous but have global market value”, he said.
According to Inuwa, the challenges in Nigeria, especially when it relates to e-commerce and online transactions may have over the years negatively impacted on the dwindling trust but with the call for the adoption of international standards, there is hope that every transaction will be trusted in Nigeria.
“With digital trust in place, the plan is to have automated transactions and electronically generated invoice afterwards, this and more are possible but it is not something to be done at a local level, hence, partnering key players like the SON and international bodies like the BSI”.
“We look forward to building a stronger and mutually productive relationship as well as be a part of the global ecosystem,” he said.
