Adeyemi Adepetun writes on the planned collaboration between the Federal Government through the Nigerian Communications Commission and state governments to deepen the country’s broadband penetration
The economic impact of broadband penetration has been found to be quite impressive. In fact, World Bank studies show, quite conclusively, that in low and middle–income countries, every 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration accelerates economic growth by 1.38 percentage points.
Interestingly, to achieve all these, the NCC’s Strategic Vision Plan 2021 to 2025 and Strategic Management Plan 2020 to 2024, made collaboration and partnership with public and private stakeholders key pillars. The Governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki, delivered a goodwill message on behalf of the state governors, during which he highlighted the digital progress being made in Edo, especially in e-Governance in health and education.Among the objectives of the TAF identified was the needs to begin the process of developing a sub-national strategy for deploying broadband facilities at the state level to enable the achievement of the national broadband penetration target of 70 per cent by 2025.
The forum also noted that over 83.3 million subscribers are on broadband networks of 3G and 4G, which are having a practical and positive impact across sectors of the economy, including household consumption, healthcare, education, agriculture, finance, transportation, commerce, and governance, among others.
According to them, the first Broadband Plan was severely hamstrung by issues of Right of Way , regulation and taxes, security of infrastructure, spectrum allocation, investment and funding.In view of the foregoing observations and deliberations at the forum, some resolutions were reached, and recommendations were made.
There was also a call for the adoption of a Public-Private-Partnership model for infrastructure build-out, funding and driving broadband penetration in the states, especially for cost reduction.