The Federal Government will commence the rollout of its planned 90,000-kilometre nationwide fibre-optic network in October, the Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani, has announced.
Tijani disclosed this on Thursday in Abuja while speaking at the National Innovation Hub Standards Framework Workshop, convened to validate proposed standards, evaluation criteria and implementation plans for innovation hubs across Nigeria.
He said funding for the project had been secured, describing the fibre expansion as a key component of the administration’s efforts to strengthen Nigeria’s broadband infrastructure and extend reliable connectivity to underserved areas.
“President Bola Tinubu approved that we must deepen connectivity and we’re investing in 90,000 kilometres of fibre optic network.
By the time we are done, it’s going to be either the third or second longest fibre optic network on the African continent, somewhere between what we have in South Africa and Egypt.
And this is a project that is starting implementation in October. We have raised the funding for it,” Tijani said.
The announcement gives a definite October start date to Project BRIDGE, otherwise known as Building Resilient Digital Infrastructure for Growth, which the Federal Government had earlier targeted for implementation in the fourth quarter of 2026.
Under the initiative, at least 90,000km of additional fibre will be deployed nationwide through a public-private partnership.
The expansion is expected to increase Nigeria’s fibre backbone from approximately 35,000km to about 125,000km.
Several development partners are backing the project financially. The World Bank approved $500 million for the initiative in October 2025, while the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development committed $100 million, alongside a €22 million grant from the European Union.
In April 2026, the African Development Bank also approved $200 million for the Digital Value Chain Infrastructure for Boosting Employment project, which includes Project BRIDGE.
Tijani said the fibre rollout formed part of a wider government plan to establish the infrastructure needed to accelerate Nigeria’s digital economy.
He noted that technology was increasingly central to productivity in key areas such as agriculture, healthcare and education.
According to the minister, the government’s digital strategy is built around three major layers. The first involves foundational infrastructure, including fibre-optic networks, electricity, telecommunications towers, satellites and data centres.
The second focuses on digital platforms such as identity and payment systems, while the third involves innovators and businesses developing products and services on the infrastructure.
In addition to the fibre network, Tijani said the government would deploy nearly 3,700 telecommunications towers to communities that currently have no network coverage.
“There are over 20 million of those people in this country today living in communities where there’s no access to telecommunications at all,” he said.
He also disclosed plans to renew Nigeria’s communications satellite to improve connectivity in locations where terrestrial infrastructure and telecommunications towers may be difficult to deploy.
The minister connected the investments in digital infrastructure to the Federal Government’s target of growing Nigeria into a $1 trillion economy, stressing that such an ambition could not be achieved through dependence on oil and gas alone.
“The bigger our economy gets, the more jobs we create, the more taxes we’re able to capture, the more money we have available to deliver roles and services to our people,” he said.
“And that we cannot achieve just through oil and gas. If we can create more companies like Andela, like Paystack, like Flutterwave, the future of Nigeria is, of course, extremely bright.”
Meanwhile, the Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, Kashifu Abdullahi, said the proposed National Innovation Hub Standards Framework was designed to tackle uneven standards and the concentration of innovation hubs in only a handful of locations.
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Abdullahi said research had identified more than 339 innovation hubs across Nigeria, but noted that a significant number were concentrated in Lagos, Abuja and a few other states.
“We find it necessary to standardise across the country so that you don’t need to travel from Yola to Yaba for you to grow your business,” Abdullahi said.
He explained that the framework consists of seven dimensions and about 35 assessment criteria, which innovation hubs would use to evaluate their capabilities, identify areas requiring improvement and work towards becoming stronger startup incubators.
Abdullahi further disclosed that NITDA was collaborating with the Ministry of Education to introduce digital skills into formal education, identifying poor coordination between academic institutions and industry as one of the persistent weaknesses in Nigeria’s technology ecosystem.
The Acting Head of Partnerships at the Delegation of the European Union to Nigeria and ECOWAS, Prof. Leila Ben-Amor, said establishing common standards would be essential to maintaining the rapid growth of the country’s innovation ecosystem.
She said Team Europe and its member states were providing more than €820 million in support for Nigeria’s digital ecosystem between 2021 and 2027 through programmes such as the EU-Nigeria Digital Package and the Global Gateway Strategy.
“Scale without a common standard is fragile,” Ben-Amor said, adding that the proposed framework could form part of the wider digital architecture being supported by the EU and its partners.
Representing Denmark’s Consul General to Nigeria, Jette Bjerrum, the Senior Programme Manager at the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Nigeria, Nosakhare Ayejimiwo, said a national benchmark would improve the quality and capacity of innovation hubs while enabling governments and development partners to direct support more effectively.
She stressed that the success of the framework would depend on sustained collaboration among government institutions, the private sector, development partners, entrepreneurs and innovation hub operators.