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Data is critical to building Nigeria’s much sought digital economy, Director General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Mallam Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, has affirmed while participating in an on-line US-Nigeria Digital Trade standards workshop organised by the US-Trade and Development Agency (USTDA).
Anchored on the theme: Current state of Data privacy and security in Nigeria, the workshop was one of the activities to mark the Data Privacy Week which commenced Monday 25th of January 2021 and peaked Thursday 28th: The International Data Privacy Day.
Data plays a huge role in everyday activities of a digital economy as enormous amount of data is generated, collected and stored by all equipment including the mobile phone which dominates our lives, said the NITDA’s boss,
There is need to contextualise the issues around data from three perspectives namely; namely what is data protection; how they differ and overlap; how both are affected by digitalization; and finally, what government is doing to protect and strengthen right to privacy and data protection, argued Abdullahi.
He told the audience that data protection, contrary to popular belief, is not the same thing as privacy.
“Privacy is a broad concept referring to the condition which enables basic foundation of human dignity, but data protection is more specific. It is concerned with the way third party handles the information they hold about us, how it is collected, processed, shared, stored and used. In other words, privacy is the big picture and data protection is one corner of it.
“Digitalization is creating new ways to collect, access, analyse and use data across multiple borders and jurisdictions with challenges to data privacy,” said Abdullahi.
He said the Nigerian government remains committed to strengthen privacy and data protection, which underscores why government issued the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) on 25th January 2019 to meet global standard on data protection to provide a unique with innovative implementation matrix.
“Part of the NDPR implementation strategy is sustained public awareness which was undertaken between May and October 2019. Nigeria is the first country on the African continent to dedicate a week to data protection public awareness. Other measures include establishment of Data Protection Compliance Organizations (DPCOs), Data Breach Investigation Team and Police Enforcement Teams among others,” added Abdullahi.
In addition, “the NDPR implementation framework has also succeeded in ensuring that within a year of coming on stream, a total of 635 data audit reports were filed by various entities across 13 sectors of the Nigerian economy, just as 15 investigations on alleged data breaches were undertaken while 2,686 jobs were created.
“Nigeria’s leadership in the digital world within the African continent explains why she currently sits as the vice chair of the Policy and Regulatory Initiative for Digital Africa (PRIDA) and full member of the Common Thread Network (CTN), a network of Commonwealth Nations Data Protections Authority,” the NITDA’s boss told the audience.
