Nigerian fintech Okra raises $3.5M backed by Accenture Ventures and Susa Ventures
The last five years have seen a plethora of fintech applications in Nigeria (and Africa, in general) grow at an astonishing rate. But most of these companies and developers find it difficult to access real-time banking data. This, in turn, creates a bottleneck when onboarding and verifying customers.
Since 2019, Plaid-esque companies, but with different twists to their offerings, have emerged to solve these issues. Today, Nigeria’s Okra, arguably the first to gain mainstream attention, is announcing that it has closed a seed round of $3.5 million.
U.S.-based Susa Ventures led this latest tranche of investment. Other investors include TLcom Capital (the sole investor from its $1 million pre-seed round in 2020), newly joined Accenture Ventures and some angel investors. In total, Okra has raised $4.5 million in two rounds and the company will use the investment to expand its data infrastructure acros
NITDA mulls new roadmap for development
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By Emmanuel Elebeke
The National Information and Technology Development Agency, NITDA says it is set to launch a new Strategic Roadmap and Action Plan to boost economic potentials of the nation’s information and Communication Technology, ICT sector.
The Director General of the agency, Mallam Abdullahi Kashifu, announced this during the NITDA @20 Anniversary conference held in Abuja on Monday.
He informed that the new roadmap was designed to make the IT sector the leading sector of the economy, create more activities and ignite a lot of innovations in the IT sector, help create enabling environment and also position Nigeria to tap into the 4th industrial revolution.
Pantami adjudges NITDA one of Nigeria’s most performing agency
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By Emmanuel Elebeke
The embattled Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, on Monday, shunned the media from interviewing him on his alleged connection with some terrorist groups.
The Minister, who spoke during the NITDA @20 Anniversary conference held in Abuja on Monday told journalists that he has no comment, directed them to meet with the Director General of NITDA.
Earlier in his remarks, the Minister said NITDA has achieved a lot in the area of fighting corruption through the implementation of IT Clearance policy which has saved N2 billion for the federal government, describing it as one of the most effective and high-performing agencies of government.
NITDA ensuring safe cyber space for national security – DG - vanguardngr.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from vanguardngr.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Kashifu Abdullahi, director-general of NITDA, made this known at a media briefing to commemorate the agency’s 20th anniversary in Abuja on Monday.
NITDA, as the clearing house of IT projects in Nigeria, has been mandated to clear all IT projects in line with the policy objectives of the federal government to maximise transparency and accountability in carrying out IT projects by public institutions.
Consequently, the federal government issued a circular No SGF/6/S.19/T/65 of 18th April, 2006, directing all public institutions planning to embark on any IT project to obtain clearance from NITDA.
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Abdullahi noted that the enforcement of the policy started in December 2016 and it has helped to curb excess spendings on IT projects in public institutions.