Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA) plans to rollout switch to .ng campaign next year in an effort aimed at getting over 17.7million small and medium enterprises (SMES) in the country to register with the country’s top level domain name.
Mary Uduma, president, NiRA, said that apart from the new initiative, the association will also recruit additional resellers and registrars for .ng as a way of increasing the take up of the country’s top level domain name.
“This is a vision come true for us, which will help in popularizing the use of .ng. Now that federal government ministries and departments have fully adopted .ng and unified email system, we are go to focus on state governments to follow same. We are collaborating with National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) to help states and local government actualize this through provision of the required infrastructure for this to happen. Ekiti state has done it, others will still do it,” she said.
Uduma noted that NiRA is also partnering with federal government in The Youth Enterprise with Innovation in Nigeria (You WiN!) programme which makes it mandatory for every beneficiary of the programme to register in .ng.
Mohammed Rudman, managing director, Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria, said that launch of unified email system by federal ministries and departments is a step in the right direction as it will provide the right platform for others to adopt .ng.
He explained that the unified email system allows every civil servant in the federal ministries to have a customized email which he or she can take to any other ministry if he decides to move.
“It also allows official emails to be exchange within Nigeria. It is secured as it is hosted locally by Galaxy backbone,” he said.
Mrs. Omobola Johnson, minister of Communication Technology, said the platform would allow ministries to do messaging and collaboration which is a small but very important tool for e-government in the country.