Twenty-four years after Nigeria’s GSM revolution, millions in rural areas still live offline, disconnected from opportunities that broadband could easily unlock.
At the maiden Rural Connectivity Summit organised by Business Metrics in Lagos, the President of the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), Tony Izuagbe Emoekpere, said: “We need to move away from talk shops into actions.”
Speaking under the theme “Rethinking Digital Connectivity to Unlock Rural Economic Potential,” Emoekpere said the industry must stop recycling discussions and start building practical, context-specific solutions that meet the real needs of rural Nigerians.
“We are all part of the talk shop industry, so to speak, as advocates, we go around speaking. But what impact are we having? What impact are we making?” he asked.
ATCON president noted that despite the official claim of about 200 million active telecom subscribers, many of those figures are duplicates. “They are not real people,” he stressed, noting the example of modern iPhones that can host up to eight eSIMs without a physical SIM slot.
“If you are counting that as eight subscribers, can you see the irony in that, in this, our data? Let us connect real people.”
Away from telecom subscribers, the ATCON president also challenged engineers and service providers to rethink their design approach, saying too many solutions are borrowed from other regions without adaptation. “We just borrow technology. We are very lazy. We borrow technology,” he said.
“You are supposed to go to an OEM and say, ‘This is a problem I want to solve.’ Design the system to suit that problem.”
According to him, many of Nigeria’s rural challenges, from banking exclusion to market access for farmers, could be solved with basic, fit-for-purpose digital tools. “The lowest of the lowest hanging fruit in the rural communities is that they are unbanked,” he said.
“If you try and adopt the POS system, for example, and make it a rural solution that allows POS to operate in rural communities, you have already brought people into the banking sector.”
He gave another example: farmers in remote villages selling produce at unfairly low prices because they lack access to real-time market data. “If I tell the village that, I can give you real-time prices of what you produce, what has been sold. Pay me 10 Naira for that information, for example, so that when the middle man comes to me and says, ‘I’m paying,’ the guy says, ‘No, I’ve received information that pineapple today in Lagos is 3,000 Naira.’ Even if you are transporting it, I cannot collect less than 500 Naira,” he said.
Emoekpere emphasised that the problem is not the absence of markets in rural Nigeria, but the industry’s failure to understand and serve that market correctly. “That there is no market in the rural community is wrong. The issue is our approach to that market,” he said.
He urged organisers and participants at the summit to ensure concrete outcomes beyond conversations. “At the end of the day, we are looking at action, actionable points and even identifying potential drivers, say, ‘Mr A is going to do this, Mr B is going to do that.’”
Connecting rural Nigeria requires empathy, innovation, and accountability, far beyond technology deployment. “We must connect real people,” he concluded.