Case Study - A Sovereign Data Platform for Nigeria's Innovation Ecosystem

Overview

When the Research and Innovation Coordinating Committee of Nigeria set out to run a national readiness study across universities, research institutes, and innovation stakeholders, the existing toolkit — Google Forms and spreadsheets — fell apart on contact with reality. Data officers in rural zones had no internet. Vice-Chancellors had no way to formally sign off on submissions. The secretariat had no real-time view of who had responded. And nobody could credibly tell the federal government the data was sovereign. We were brought in to rebuild the whole stack on a hard committee deadline.

The Phase 1 deliverable, presented to the committee in December 2025 and rolled out to pilot in January 2026, comprised five components: a dynamic survey engine routing stakeholders across ten distinct questionnaires with conditional branching and a kiosk mode for field enumerators; a Vice-Chancellor authorizer flow with read-only summary, touchscreen signature pad, and magic-link sign-off; a real-time admin dashboard broken down by geopolitical zone; a security and governance baseline with append-only audit logs, encryption at rest, immutable ransomware-resilient backups, and an edge perimeter — all packaged so the entire stack can be lifted into government-managed sovereign infrastructure without a rewrite; and an analytics layer with a TRL diagnostic and a Commercialization Likelihood scoring engine.

Phase 2 and 3 build on the same foundation: a unified innovator registry where innovators register IP and business models and complete a TRL self-assessment with evidence; a funder portal where institutional and private funders manage profiles and receive matches; an AI-driven matchmaking engine pairing innovators at the right readiness level with the right financing instrument; a milestone-based disbursement tracker that releases tranches against verified evidence; and an M&E dashboard for program impact at national scale. Field data entry continues to work end-to-end with zero connectivity, the local cache is encrypted, the audit log is append-only, and the hosting layer is packaged specifically so the whole stack can lift into Nigeria-resident sovereign infrastructure as the sovereignty conversation matures — no rewrite, no migration tax.

What we did