2 weeks Ago By Folake Balogun
Nigeria’s data protection ecosystem is projected to generate N13.8 billion in revenue in 2025, a 15 percent increase from the N12 billion recorded in 2024. Vincent Olatunji, the national commissioner of the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC), disclosed this during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday in Abuja.
Read also: Data centres to pump $630m on growing internet usage He noted that the projected growth is driven by the increasing number of Data Protection Compliance Organisations (DPCOs) and the expanding scope of data compliance services in the country. “These are businesses we have opened up by licensing professionals and skilled personnel to provide compliance services to data controllers and processors,” he stated. DPCOs help businesses understand and implement Nigeria’s data protection laws, and their services range from compliance audits to privacy training, with some reportedly charging as much as N10 million to N20 million for data audits, especially when dealing with multinational firms.
Each DPCO typically employs between five and ten people, depending on client base, further contributing to job creation in the tech and compliance sector. So far, 256 DPCOs have been licensed by the NDPC, with another 55 added just a few months into 2025. Olatunji added, “When you bring together what the organisations and their employees earn, including the support services around compliance, that’s how we estimate the total revenue.
We are three years into building this data protection and privacy ecosystem, and while Nigeria is already seen as a model by some African countries, we know there’s still a lot of work to do.” Read also: Why data strategy will shape the future of African tech Nigeria’s data protection landscape was boosted by the signing of the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA) into law by President Bola Tinubu on June 12, 2023. The Act replaced the earlier Data Protection Regulations (NDPR) of 2019 and the NDPR Implementation Framework under the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA).
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