Ife Adebayo, National Coordinator of Nigeria’s Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises (IDICE) initiative breaks down how iDICE’s training, funding and policy components work as one connected system, not three separate programmes:
Almost every week, someone asks me a version of the same question.
Sometimes it’s a founder: “Is iDICE the training thing, or the funding thing?” Sometimes it’s a policymaker, or a partner, or a journalist. Sometimes it’s someone who’s seen three different iDICE posts and quietly assumed they were three different programmes.
And I understand why. Most people only ever touch the one part of iDICE that reaches them, so they picture that part as the whole.
So, this is the answer I keep giving, written down. If you’ve ever wondered how the pieces fit together, this is the whole picture.
Here’s the gap iDICE was built to close
Nigeria has one of the youngest, most creative and most digitally curious populations on earth. Yet the path from talented to thriving is broken in several places at once.
Young people get skilled but never linked to work. Founders build but cannot raise funds. Capital exists but does not reach the founders who need it most. This is even worse for founders outside Nigeria’s tech capital of Lagos. And the regulations, policies and frameworks often lag behind the ecosystems they are meant to enable.
The natural instinct when attempting to proffer solutions is usually to fix one of these problems. Implement a training programme. Start a fund. Push a policy.
That is exactly what we tried to do when we set out to design the iDICE Programme.
At the time, I had worked with the World Bank’s GEM initiative to support startups with almost a billion naira. We had engaged local and global technology companies to run the Aso Villa Demo Day programme attended by Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. Before this, we had supported startup initiatives and established hubs through the National Social Investment Program (NSIP), but these efforts were only scratching the surface.
When I had my first conversation with Uyoyo Edosio about creating enduring support for Nigerian startups, we initially focused on solving the funding challenge. The African Development Bank funded the first step through a pre-feasibility study and a feasibility study. Tochukwu Mbanugo led the pre-feasibility process, while PricewaterhouseCoopers conducted the feasibility study.
Both studies examined global case studies, including the African Development Bank’s Coding for Employment Programme, the Indian Government’s India Innovation Growth Programme, Agence Française de Développement’s Choose Africa Initiative and the Israeli Government’s Yozma Programme.
We also analysed existing initiatives run by the Bank of Industry, Lagos State Government, Edo State Government and NITDA Nigeria.
Most importantly, we engaged ecosystem stakeholders to understand their pain points, ideas and recommendations as we designed the programme.
One thing became very clear during this process: pull one lever alone, funding, and the others hold you back. You can train ten thousand developers, but if the policy environment is weak and there is no capital or company to hire them, you have simply trained people to emigrate.
iDICE is designed around that hard lesson. It pulls all the levers at once.
The Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises (iDICE) Programme is a Federal Government of Nigeria initiative designed to help young Nigerians turn digital and creative talent into real businesses and real jobs. It is funded by the Bank of Industry (BOI), African Development Bank Group (AfDB), Agence Française de Développement (AFD) and Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), with BOI serving as the executing agency.
It achieves this through three connected components. The easiest way to understand them is not as three departments, but as three stages of one journey.
Component 1: Skills and Enterprise Development, building the conveyor belt
The first component focuses on talent, and it works at two levels.
I like to describe the first level as a conveyor belt. It takes young people and equips them with digital and creative skills, from basic to intermediate and then to genuinely advanced levels. Crucially, it links them to work rather than leaving them with a certificate and no next step.
This commitment to employment has been embedded in iDICE from the concept stage and shapes every decision, from the design of training opportunities to implementation.
The second level focuses on the businesses and institutions surrounding those young people.
It is not enough to skill individuals; the ecosystem that supports them must also be strengthened. This component therefore supports hubs, incubators and accelerators, collectively known as Enterprise Support Organisations (ESOs), which help transform promising ideas into investable companies.
This is also where iDICE’s physical footprint comes in.
We are remodelling and equipping innovation hubs and digital and creative laboratories in universities and polytechnics across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones, ensuring students in places such as Jigawa, Enugu, Kogi and Maiduguri have spaces where they can innovate.
Each hub will specialise in areas chosen by its institution, including digital technology, animation, cybersecurity and the creative industries, helping prepare Nigerian startups to compete globally.
Component 2: Access to Finance, blended capital built to reach the overlooked
Skilled founders with strong companies still encounter the same obstacle: funding.
Nigeria attracts significant venture capital, but investment remains concentrated by stage, sector and geography. Many promising companies outside the established networks simply go unnoticed.
This component addresses that challenge through blended finance, deliberately combining different forms of capital because founders need different types of support at different stages.
That includes grants that help early businesses become investment-ready, equity and quasi-equity for growth-stage companies, and debt financing for businesses prepared to scale.
According to Africa: The Big Deal’s “H1 2026: Mapping the Money” report, Nigerian startups raised approximately $214 million in equity during the first half of 2026, reclaiming the country’s position as Africa’s leading destination for startup equity investment.
The mechanism behind the programme is particularly important.
Private investors are often cautious about early-stage African startups, especially those outside established innovation hubs. The iDICE equity funds therefore operate in a first-loss position, offering up to 30 per cent first-loss protection for participating investors.
That cushion reduces investment risk, attracts private capital and encourages investment in founders outside Lagos who might otherwise be overlooked.
The programme currently operates through its Tech Fund investment in the Ventures Platform Fund and its appointment of Kuramo Capital Management as Fund-of-Funds manager.
It also provides debt financing through a BOI debt facility and an Islamic Development Bank non-interest financing facility.
Component 3: Advocacy and the Enabling Environment, fixing the rules of the game
The third component is often the least visible, yet it may be the most important.
You can train talent and provide capital, but growth still stalls if regulations and policies fail to keep pace.
That includes intellectual property protections that do not adequately cover digital and creative work, investment rules that discourage startup investors, outdated academic curricula and regulators attempting to govern technologies evolving faster than existing legislation.
This component works directly with ministries, agencies and policymakers to strengthen that environment.
Its work includes supporting implementation of the Startup Act at state level, modernising investor protections, promoting technology and creative exports, and updating university curricula and technical education frameworks.
The programme is currently finalising an intellectual property securitisation framework with relevant government stakeholders. The framework aims to support future legislation that would allow startups to use intellectual property as collateral.
The programme is also working with the National Universities Commission to update STEM curricula and with the National Board for Technical Education to modernise the ICT Skills Qualifications Framework.
It is not glamorous work, but it is what separates temporary interventions from lasting systemic change.
Why none of the three components survives alone
Here is the one point I hope readers remember.
None of these three components survives alone.
Infrastructure without training is a room full of idle machines.
Training without capital prepares talent for someone else’s economy, fuelling the japa phenomenon.
Capital without the right policies and regulations becomes money that cannot move.
The real strength of iDICE is not any single intervention. It lies in the connections between them: the trained young person who joins an Enterprise Support Organisation’s startup, the startup that becomes investable, and the investment made possible because the policy environment finally supports innovation.
Ife Adebayo is the National Coordinator of the Federal Government of Nigeria’s Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises (IDICE) initiative.
