As preparations intensify for the 2026 Digital Nigeria Conference and Exhibition (DNICE), the Federal Government, through the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), has partnered with ecosystem builder Tech Revolution Africa to launch the DNICE Builders Festival. The collaborative program targets public and private sector institutions, inviting them to submit their primary operational and structural challenges for technical matching with homegrown technology firms.

The program structure represents a departure from traditional tech hackathons, focusing Instead on “Demand Discovery”. Federal Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs), non-governmental organizations, and organized private sector firms are being given the opportunity to present specific problem statements spanning financial inclusion, regulatory compliance, data infrastructure, healthcare distribution, and supply chain logistics.

The top-ranked institutional challenges will be published to pull in applications from Africa’s leading growth-stage tech startups. Vetted startup teams will then be paired with the participating organizations to pitch live deployments and secure investment commitments before government stakeholders, business leaders, and international development partners at the Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Conference Centre, Abuja, this coming August.

Stressing the alignment of the festival with national digital transformation goals, Dr. Aristotle Onumo, Director of Stakeholder Management and Partnerships at NITDA, stated that the initiative is critical for embedding local content into institutional infrastructure.

“Our objective at NITDA is to foster an environment where local innovation directly services institutional needs. The DNICE Builders Festival bridges the historic disconnect between large-scale public or private enterprises and our domestic tech ecosystem. By formalizing this challenge-matching framework, we are ensuring that Nigerian technology talent is mobilized systematically to solve the country’s most urgent administrative and commercial infrastructure hurdles.”

The call for submissions is currently live, with organizers emphasizing that early entries will receive priority during the independent engineering review and sector clustering stages.

Overall the process is surmised into the following:

1. Submission of operational bottlenecks
2. Matching with the best startups
3. Entrance and participation in the international deal room.

Glory Olamigoke, Co-founder at Tech Revolution Africa, explained that the initiative is built to solve real-world complexities rather than theoretical market models, maximizing the impact of local engineering talent.

“Africa does not suffer from a shortage of technical talent; it suffers from a coordination gap between complex, systemic problems and the builders who can solve them. The Builders Festival is designed to eliminate that friction. We are providing a secure, structured runway where an organization can point to an exact operational vulnerability and be matched with high-performing teams who have already figured out the underlying technology, thereby shortening the time to deployment and saving significant capital.”

“The submission window for all qualified corporations, development agencies, and public institutions remains open until the 1st of July, 2026,” the organisers said in a statement.