Nigeria Startup Act Implementation Gets New Push From NITDA
Quick Reads
- NITDA brought together more than 15 government agencies in Abuja this week.
- The meeting aimed to coordinate how Nigeria delivers incentives under its 2022 Startup Act.
- NITDA reported 12,948 registered startups in 2024 but now says it serves fewer than 3,000.
- A new study blames bureaucratic bottlenecks for the law’s slow implementation.
- Nigeria’s startup funding has slipped behind Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt.
Nigeria Startup Act implementation is getting a fresh push from regulators in Abuja. The National Information Technology Development Agency, or NITDA, gathered representatives from more than 15 government institutions this week. They met under the Nigerian Startup Act Incentives Activation Co-Creation Session, organised by NITDA’s Office for Nigerian Digital Innovation.
ONDI National Coordinator Victoria Fabunmi, on behalf of NITDA Director-General Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi said implementation now demands more than policy design. Agencies must actively work together to deliver the Act’s promised benefits, she explained. She also said that coordination matters because incentives span trade, finance, communications, innovation, and science and technology portfolios. As Fabunmi noted at the session, no single institution can deliver all these incentives alone.
Meanwhile, the Nigeria Startup Act still faces a credibility gap between registration and results. NITDA opened its startup registration portal back in November 2023. By April 2024, the agency reported 12,948 startups had registered for labelling.
However, NITDA now says it currently serves fewer than 3,000 startups, and the agency’s public information does not currently explain the difference. That gap matters because registering for the Startup Label does not automatically guarantee tax relief, funding, or regulatory support.
An independent study published in June 2026 helps explain the slow rollout. Researchers surveyed ten experts across Nigeria’s innovation policy and startup ecosystem. They identified insufficient funding, bureaucratic bottlenecks, policy incoherence, and low awareness as root causes. Bureaucratic bottlenecks emerged as the single most influential barrier, the study found.
Meanwhile, competition among African markets keeps intensifying. Partech’s 2025 Africa Tech Venture Capital report ranked Kenya first in combined funding at $1.04 billion. South Africa followed at $715 million, then Egypt at $604 million, then Nigeria at $572 million. Nigeria’s total funding fell 3% year on year, though its equity-only ranking held steady at third.
NITDA is also building a National Regulatory Sandbox to let startups test products under flexible conditions. Still, the true measure of progress won’t be attendance at coordination meetings. It will be whether a labelled founder can actually claim a tax benefit without months of bureaucratic runaround. Four years after signing, Nigeria has assembled the right people around the table. Turning that coordination into real founder benefits remains the unfinished work.
