Anambra State is accelerating the second phase of its digital transformation programme, setting a firm 2030 target to digitise every government ministry, department, and agency while simultaneously using technology to bring the state’s large population of informal small businesses into the formal economy.
The initiative, led by the Anambra State ICT Agency under Managing Director Chukwuemeka Fred Agbata, marks a deliberate shift from infrastructure building to practical, intelligence-led governance — with small business formalisation placed at the centre of the agenda.
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From connectivity to e-governance
The first phase of Anambra’s digital strategy focused on establishing basic technology infrastructure across the state. Phase two is materially different in ambition. The ICT Agency has adapted an open-source artificial intelligence system to run its internal operations end-to-end — one of the most concrete AI deployments by a sub-national government in Nigeria. Rather than building a frontier AI model from scratch or entering expensive vendor agreements, Anambra adapted existing permissionless large language models for localised, administrative problem-solving — a cost-effective and pragmatic approach that other state governments have not yet replicated at scale.
The agency is building operational websites for all government MDAs, moving beyond information pages to platforms that actually deliver services online. The State Executive Council is already operating a fully paperless system, with the model set to extend progressively across the civil service.
Moving government services online reduces the physical cost of compliance for every business that currently spends time and transport money dealing with state agencies in person. For small businesses in Onitsha and Nnewi, where transaction volumes are high and administrative burden is real, e-governance is not an abstract reform — it is a direct reduction in the cost of operating formally.
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The SME formalisation link
Agbata identified SME formalisation as one of the biggest challenges his agency is directly targeting. Anambra’s commercial activity is driven by trading, manufacturing, and thousands of small businesses — many of which operate informally and are therefore invisible to the financial system, ineligible for government programmes, and unable to build the credit history that enables growth.
The ICT Agency is working with the Ministry of Commerce to develop digital pathways that make it easier for businesses operating in major markets to register and enter the formal economy. The strategy builds on Anambra’s existing partnership with Flutterwave, which has been deploying payment links, invoicing tools, POS systems, and online storefronts in high-density trading clusters in Onitsha and Nnewi — directly bridging the gap between the cash-driven informal market and the digital commerce infrastructure that formal buyers and lenders require.
Governor Chukwuma Soludo has separately invested N80 million across 80 startups and supported digital skills training that has reached over 264,000 Anambra residents through the 1 Million Anambra Digital Tribe programme, with a N1 billion Connectivity Fund announced to support broadband expansion across all 21 local government areas.
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What it means for small businesses
For the SMEs operating across Anambra’s busy commercial corridors, the convergence of e-governance, digital formalisation tools, and state-level AI deployment creates a materially improved environment for business registration and compliance. A business that can register digitally, pay levies through a mobile platform, and access government services without visiting an office is more likely to formalise — and formalisation is the gateway to credit, insurance, procurement, and the institutional support that informal operators cannot access.
Formalisation has historically felt like a cost to Nigerian small businesses — a registration fee, a compliance burden, a reason to stay invisible. Anambra is trying to make it feel like an opportunity by ensuring the digital services on the other side of registration are actually worth having.
