Govt plans centralised digital portal for public services
The Federal Government is advancing efforts to develop a one-stop digital portal for accessing government services, aligning with its target to digitise 75 per cent of public services by 2027.
The initiative, led by the National Information Technology Development Agency, seeks to enhance governance, improve service delivery, and foster transparency.
The disclosure was made in a statement on Monday after NITDA’s Director-General, Kashifu Inuwa, received a delegation from the Ukrainian Embassy in Nigeria, led by Ambassador Ivan Kholostenko, at the agency’s headquarters in Abuja.
The discussions focused on potential areas of collaboration between Nigeria and Ukraine to advance e-governance and streamline government processes.
According to Inuwa, the one-stop-shop digital platform being developed by NITDA will serve as a central hub for accessing government services, reducing bureaucratic bottlenecks, and increasing efficiency.
Despite several years of attempts to set up such a platform—including the OneGov.net initiative—Inuwa noted that renewed commitment and extensive research into global best practices have reignited the push for a unified digital government services platform.
“NITDA has been playing a pivotal role in shaping the design, standard guidelines, and implementation strategies towards this initiative,” he said.
Inuwa highlighted the agency’s ongoing research on successful models from countries such as the UK and Kenya.
“We have been studying how these nations have implemented unified digital government services. While such models are not entirely transferable, we can learn from their experiences to develop a framework that works for Nigeria,” he stated.
To ensure a seamless and legally backed transition, Inuwa emphasised the need for regulatory frameworks.
He noted that NITDA has identified various models where some governments provide services through an application programming interface, while others offer them exclusively via dedicated portals supported by legislation.
“If we want to achieve this, we need to have these laws in place and begin the process of enacting them to facilitate a smooth and effective digital transformation,” he added.
In his remark, Mr. Kholostenko said that Ukraine runs a digital platform known as the Diia application, which is an ecosystem that encompasses all of the state registers and databases and can perform all the state and government services for citizens in one place.
He disclosed that it is the intention of his country, through its Ministry of Digital Transformation, to expand the reach of this initiative and provide full support for other countries to create such a system.
