By Ijeoma Olorunfemi
The Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) says that it has created a data privacy, protection ecosystem worth over 12 million dollars in the past three years.
Dr Vincent Olatunji, the National Commissioner, NDPC, said this on Friday at a news conference in Abuja, to mark the commission’s third year of existence.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA) was signed by President Bola Tinubu on June 12, 2023, which established the commission with statutory rights to regulate data processing in the country.
Following the establishment of the Act, Olatunji said the commission set up its National Data Protection Strategic Roadmap and Action Plan (NDPA-SRAP).
He said that the roadmap had five pillars which included Governance, Awareness and Human Capital Development, Ecosystem and Technology, Cooperation and Collaboration, and Funding and Sustainability.
He said funding had always been a huge challenge across sectors of government around the globe, but it had devised strategies for sustainability.
“If you look at awareness alone, awareness is huge, it’s massive in terms of funding, and even to fund our projects is very difficult. However, we are lucky that from the beginning of President Bola Tinubu’s administration, we have enjoyed tremendous support.
“This has brought us to where we are today, and we also borrowed the idea of sustainability through Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) model, not relying only on government funding.
“We generate our revenue from registration, fines, donations, and in terms of revenue to government, we have done 8.6 billion within last three years.
“We have created an economy around data privacy, protection which is over 12 million dollars as we speak,” he said.
He further said that the sector had employed over 27,000 people working in the data privacy, protection ecosystem in Nigeria.
For the governance pillar, the national commissioner said it had deployed the PPP model that attracted other countries to Nigeria to learn the model and had brought about so many success stories.
According to him, in terms of governance structure, it has the law and the institution to drive the law and was deepening that across different sectors, both public and private, and among people that collect and process data of Nigerians.
He said that it had registered over 40,000 Data Protection Controllers and Processors (DPCOs), licensed over 8,000 data controllers, and licensed about 324 Data Protection Compliance Organisations.
He added that it had also recorded over 7,000 certified data protection officers.
For awareness and human capital development, he said the commission engaged a co-creation kind of approach, whereby stakeholders and the private sector were involved in the development of the law.
He added that it started ‘Adopt A School’ awareness programme to educate students on data protection, created data privacy clubs, raised awareness on data privacy career paths and targeted sensitising one million students across the country on privacy rights.
Olatunji said it had signed 38 Memoranda of Understanding, both locally and internationally, and engaged privacy-by-design to achieve its goals in the past three years.(NAN)(www.nannews.ng)
Edited by Christiana Fadare