Nigeria has cut the planned delivery period for its $2 billion national fibre infrastructure project from five years to three, bringing forward an ambitious expansion of the country’s digital backbone as the government seeks to connect 40 million people who remain without internet access.
Bosun Tijani, minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, disclosed the revised timeline at Semafor’s ‘The Next 3 Billion’ event in New York on Tuesday, saying the 90,000-kilometre fibre network is now expected to be completed within three years.
The acceleration means Nigeria is seeking to build one of the largest expansions of fibre infrastructure on the continent in a substantially shorter period than originally envisaged. The project, known as Project BRIDGE, is designed to extend the country’s fibre backbone from roughly 30,000km–35,000km to about 120,000km–125,000km.
The World Bank has committed $500 million to BRIDGE, while the African Development Bank approved another $200 million in April 2026. The project is being structured around a special purpose vehicle intended to attract private capital alongside development-finance funding.
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The scale of the rollout is significant because Nigeria’s connectivity problem is no longer simply a question of whether a mobile signal reaches a location. The government is increasingly focused on what Tijani described as “meaningful connectivity”, reliable, high-speed access that enables people and businesses to use digital services productively.
“What we do not have is meaningful connectivity, the sort of connectivity that you truly need to be able to benefit from the sort of innovation that we’re seeing,” Tijani said at the New York event.
Project BRIDGE is intended to provide wholesale, open-access fibre infrastructure that telecom operators, internet service providers and other digital businesses can use to extend services into underserved markets.
The World Bank says the project is designed to deploy more than 90,000km of fibre and connect critical public infrastructure, including 38,800 public schools, 16,900 health facilities and 3,400 local government offices. It is also expected to extend connectivity to all 774 local government areas.
The African Development Bank said its $200 million financing will support the deployment across Nigeria, with the expanded backbone expected to reach about 120,000km and connect local governments, schools, health facilities, agro-industrial zones and rural communities.
The infrastructure is therefore more than a consumer broadband project. It is intended to create the middle-mile backbone needed for operators and service providers to take connectivity deeper into communities.
That distinction matters because laying fibre nationally does not automatically put an internet connection into every home. The national network provides the underlying capacity; operators and ISPs still have to build the last-mile connections that bring services to households, businesses and institutions.
The government is pairing the fibre expansion with a separate programme to deploy 3,700 telecommunications towers, which Tijani said would be completed within two years.
The combination is aimed at addressing different layers of Nigeria’s connectivity problem.
Fibre provides high-capacity transmission infrastructure, while towers extend mobile network coverage to locations where fixed broadband deployment may be difficult or commercially unattractive. Together, the projects are designed to increase both the reach and quality of digital services.
The government has previously described the tower programme, under the National Connectivity and Access Programme, as an effort to extend mobile connectivity into underserved and unserved communities.
The challenge will be turning infrastructure deployment into actual usage. Nigeria has a large population with access to some form of network coverage, yet a substantial share of those who live within coverage areas do not use mobile internet.
This creates what policymakers and the telecom industry increasingly describe as a usage gap, a situation where people are technically covered by a network but remain offline because of affordability, device costs, digital skills, service quality or other barriers.
Tijani also linked the infrastructure programme to Nigeria’s ambition to develop an artificial intelligence economy.
Nigeria has positioned AI as part of its broader strategy to build a $1 trillion economy by 2030. But the minister said infrastructure alone would not be enough, arguing that countries must first digitise their economies and build the human capacity required to participate in the AI economy.
“If we truly want AI to be inclusive, even before we start talking about compute, we have to ensure that most countries’ realities are digitized. The starting point for a country like ours is to invest in talent,” Tijani said.
The sequencing is important. High-capacity fibre creates the infrastructure for cloud computing, data centres, digital public services and AI applications, but it does not by itself create the local talent, datasets or computing capacity required to develop those technologies.
Nigeria’s digital infrastructure strategy is therefore increasingly being built around three connected requirements: expanding broadband infrastructure, increasing the number of people who actually use digital services, and developing the skills and local capacity to create value from those connections.
The decision to compress the fibre project from five years to three raises the importance of execution.
The World Bank project documents envisage a phased deployment of the 90,000km network, with fibre largely using existing transport infrastructure rights-of-way. The project also anticipates challenges around rights-of-way and economic disruption along some routes.
Financing and construction are only part of the challenge. Nigeria must also ensure that the new backbone is commercially usable, resilient and connected to last-mile networks.
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The project is being structured as an open-access network precisely to allow multiple service providers to use the infrastructure rather than requiring each operator to duplicate the same long-distance fibre routes. The World Bank says the SPV will provide wholesale services to internet service providers on transparent and non-discriminatory terms.
If delivered at the new pace, the 90,000km expansion would fundamentally alter the scale of Nigeria’s national digital backbone. But its economic impact will ultimately depend on what happens beyond the fibre itself: whether operators extend last-mile networks, whether households and businesses can afford access, and whether the new infrastructure translates into higher-quality digital services.
Royal Ibeh is a senior journalist with years of experience reporting on Nigeria’s technology and health sectors. She currently covers the Technology and Health beats for BusinessDay newspaper, where she writes in-depth stories on digital innovation, telecom infrastructure, healthcare systems, and public health policies.
