Nigeria Content Online

Plans
are underway for the federal government to create technology incubation
centres in the 36 states of the federation as a catalyst to
industrialisation in the country, said Ibrahim Kaleel Inuwa, chairman
of the National Board for Technology Incubation (NBTI).

Mr Inuwa made the
announcement when he led the members of the NBTI governing board on a
visit to ministry of Science and Technology in Abuja last week.

“There are 36
states and we want to have at least one technology incubation centre in
every state,” said Mr. Inuwa. “We want to go to the stage of having one
centre per local government later, but that is dependent on
availability of funds.” Mr

Inuwa described
technology incubation as a mechanism for commercialising research and
development results. He said the centres will help make Nigeria a
technologically competitive nation as it will provide avenues for
transforming innovations into commercial products.

“In each incubation
centre there are facilities that inventors need to help them
commercialise their products. Once they spend like three years in our
centre they will be able to go to the market. Nigeria is a large
country with a large number of people and anything you do will sell,”
he said.

Proper packaging of ideas

Laraba Abullahi,
director general of NBTI said that the board was working on
commercialising 40 new research ideas. Their aim was to ensure that the
ideas are properly packaged, patented and placed in the market to add
value to lives.

Ms. Abdullahi
called on local entrepreneurs and researchers to make the best
ofopportunities available in the 21 incubation centres across the
country. However, the project has not been without its issues.

Mr Inuwa noted the challenges of inadequate funding for establishing
and equipping the centres and said that access to land is also a
problem in some states, especially in the Niger Delta region. “We also
noted the problems facing some of the centres with respect to support
from the host state governments and appointments are being made to meet
with the governors of the states and the Nigerian governors’ forum to
address the issue.”