Nigeria’s biggest challenges to date are unemployment, electricity access, and infrastructure, food security, crime and road quality.
According to the 2020 World Bank Doing Business report, Nigeria ranks 171 out of 190 countries in getting electricity and electricity access is seen as one of the major constraints for the private sector, leaving 85 million Nigerians without access to the grid electricity.
In efforts to address challenges such as these, as well as other challenges related to the country’s economic growth, Innovate UK KTN’s Global Alliance Africa project is well under way in Nigeria.
This is a six-year project, funded by UK Aid, designed to strengthen, and scale local innovation and business environments in the country, with the long-term ambition to build new and stronger UK-African partnerships to maximise the creation of inclusive market access, funding and investment opportunities through innovation knowledge transfer which in turn may lead to self-sustaining economic growth.
Global Alliance Africa’s Knowledge Transfer Manager for Nigeria, Joshua Adedeji says: “With socio-economic challenges such as unemployment and poverty posing as the biggest threats, there’s no better time to look to innovation and international collaboration as the solutions that will boost the economy. Our aim is to collaborate with local innovation ecosystem practitioners and beneficiaries to enhance and strengthen innovation capacity and support for economic, social, environmental and cultural value creation in Nigeria.”
Partnerships successfully formed through the collaborations include Nigeria Climate Innovation Centre (NCIC) and Rural Electrification Agency (REA) on the Energy Catalyst project. This has also paved the more for potential partnerships such as the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), First Bank Nigeria, Nigeria British Chamber of Commerce, theNigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines, and Agriculture (NACCIMA) and others.
Adedeji further notes that the Global Alliance Africa project is driving this via three key pillars: Local to Global, Access to Funding and Connected Innovation, under which the following interventions sit:
Place-Based Innovation – aims to leverage UK, Nigerian and pan-African expertise, networks and resources in order to build capacity for local innovation ecosystem players to drive forwards stronger, more sustainable and more inclusive local ecosystems, such the Ekiti state in Nigeria.
Open Innovation: – will expand business-to-business partnerships, accelerate penetration of new innovation and increase supply chain robustness & diversification.
Collaborative R&D – aims to leverage existing funding in order to forge collaborative R&D partnerships in key thematic areas of mutual interest for UK-Africa businesses, innovators & researchers.
Global Innovation Networks – aims to establish global research and innovation networks that build collaborations and/or partnerships between KTN’s established Innovation Networks and Nigeria’s priority sector thematic challenges.
“Innovation is imperative for the economic development of any nation, especially for Nigeria, which is still in the process of growing its innovation ecosystem.
To achieve this, we need to build a fundamental innovation paradigm that will give our country incredible economic growth.
It is for this reason, that Global Alliance Africa is driving knowledge transfer and collaboration that fosters long-lasting, strategic partnerships in Nigeria to accelerate innovations that promote inclusive economic growth, job creation and reduction of poverty. Through this, together we can drive positive change through innovation.” concludes Adedeji.