A public private partnership that harnesses the strengths of both government institutions and the private sector has been identified as a veritable strategy that can boost indigenous software development in the country, Information technology experts have said.
Among those that advanced the position at the e-Nigeria 2007 that ended in Abuja on Thursday, was the Head, University Network, University of Benin, Edo State, Prof. Emmanuel Onibere, who said that Public-Private Partnerships could help develop schemes where a close collaboration between public authorities and the private sector are made to achieve specific goals by managing public and private resources.
According to him, “Private public partnerships are popular as a means of building infrastructure all over the world. Private software development organisations need to engage in cooperative software development activities in the public sector to enhance productivity and increase IT usage for a broad audience including government employees, students and the general public.”
He said, based on this, the shared goal would be to help remove barriers to digital inclusion and enable Nigerians to realize the full potential of technology through the development of quality software systems that meet the needs of all sectors and across the various tiers of governments.
Onibere explained that achieving this implied dealing with issues that often go beyond the scope of individual actors. Consequently, he suggested that the public and private sectors and civil society groups must cooperate and complement each other’s development resources. He noted that the practise of software development involved the application of principles similar to those used by engineers to build large structures to the development of complex software systems.
He averred that the complexity of the software development process requires that any form of partnership between the private and public sectors should be geared towards enhancing the whole concept of software engineering through problem definition and financing and production of quality software systems by carefully selected private partners.
Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, Prof. Cleopas Angaye, said at the conference that as part of steps towards growing the local software industry, government would embark on testing of locally designed applications and subsequently rate them using globally-recognised parameters. He said there was no going back on plans to ensure that the local software industry became an important economic sector.
Managing Director, of Comect Technologies, Mr. Chris Uwaje, said that the growth of indigenous software was predicated on the support and patronage from the public sector. He recommended a well intentioned public policy whereby government would fund the development of local applications
