Nigeria has made frantic efforts towards achieving the millennium development goals (MDGs)
as spelt out in the United Nations’ Agenda for the world. A critical assessment of the eGovernment
strategies in Nigeria is important being responsible for 20% of the population of the
entire African continent. This paper presents a review of the e-Government strategies in Nigeria;
the human capital development initiatives; the information and communications technology
(ICT) diffusion and e-Inclusion. The global and continental ranking of the country is presented
as well as recommendations to accelerate developments towards achieving the MDGs.
Findings revealed that there are ongoing efforts in Nigeria to address the issue of poverty. The
various initiatives of government include: the National/State Economic Empowerment Strategies
(NEEDS/SEEDS), the Vision 2020, the National e-Government Strategy (NeGST) and a wellformulated
National IT policy to mention a few. The little hindrance encountered in the research
is that the available data was only up to the year 2005 and 2006 in some cases.
However, based on the human capital development indices such as: economic empowerment and
poverty reduction, education, health, employment generation, etc, it was observed that the adult
literacy level of 64.2% is satisfactory and better results are expected before 2015. The life
expectancy level is constant (54 years) from 2002 to 2007, which is the one of the lowest in
Africa. On school enrolment, the major problem is access and poverty. It was observed that only
25% of primary school leavers made it to the secondary school level, while about 14% of the
students at this level made it to the tertiary level. Similarly, the average percentage of female
enrolment in schools is 45%. The health facilities are under-funded and are grossly inadequate
both in quality and quantity. There is an average of 1,700 persons per hospital bed and the ratio
of physicians to the populace is about 1:6000. This calls for a state of emergency in this sector.
One major sector of the economy that is experiencing a boost is the ICT and Telecoms. The
sector had brought about a teledensity growth of 0.73 to 37.05 from 2001 to 2007. Consequently,
Nigeria has been named the fastest growing Telecoms nation in Africa and the third in the world,
with a number of direct and indirect jobs created. Similarly, the rate of Internet diffusion is
encouraging bearing in mind that the level was almost non existent in 1999. It is obvious that
Nigeria would be able to bridge the divide by 2015.
Generally, there are some meaningful developments in the country arising from the various
poverty eradication schemes but the resultant effect has not imparted positively on
unemployment. This is the opinion of the populace and hence the need for government to
restrategize, otherwise, fulfilling MDGs by 2015 may not be realistic.