But the policy also produced an unintended outcome: government and businesses moved rapidly to public clouds, without a corresponding expansion of local cloud infrastructure. Inuwa said the push to localise cloud infrastructure is also about making Nigeria’s digital services more resilient. The discussions led to a technical working group comprising local providers and global cloud companies, which developed the framework for the sovereign cloud initiative. The initiative also seeks to address cost, a major barrier to local adoption, as cloud infrastructure in Nigeria has historically been more expensive than hosting workloads abroad, making overseas public cloud providers more attractive to startups and other businesses. The government is considering incentives to attract investment in local cloud infrastructure, although Inuwa did not specify what those incentives would be.