DevFest Jos 2025: DBI CEO Daser Calls for Tech and Tourism Push in Plateau

Jos, Nigeria – Plateau State has what it takes to become a global hub for technology and tourism if its people and government commit to nurturing talent and building digital infrastructure, according to David Daser, President and CEO of the Digital Bridge Institute (DBI).

Delivering the keynote at the 2025 Google Developer Festival (DevFest) in Jos, Daser reflected on the city’s early struggles with tech adoption. “We didn’t have funding and infrastructure when we started in Jos, but we had a hunger for knowledge,” he said. “That is what led me into tech, believing that with a level playing field, I can be anything I want to be.”

Daser convened the very first DevFest in Jos and went on to found nHub, northern Nigeria’s first technology and innovation hub. During his tenure as Director General of the Plateau Information and Communication Technology Development Agency (PICTDA), he also launched the now-defunct Code Plateau programme, which trained young people in digital skills.

He told participants the Plateau capital is “ready to build and ready to scale,” stressing that his experiences building nHub proved the potential of young innovators in the state. “What we are doing nationally is what I took from my work building nHub from here,” he said.

This year’s conference carried the theme “Building Plateau Tourism, Technology, and Talent to Scale Globally.” Daser urged the audience to see tourism not only as physical destinations but as an “experience” that can be enriched through technology. “With the right digital platform, Plateau can become a tourism hotspot,” he argued.

He noted that both technology and tourism depend on strong human capital, pointing to the role of the Digital Bridge Institute in developing talent for local and global markets. “Tourism and technology are only as strong as the people behind them,” he said. “We are working on a partnership with local hubs like nHub and Axia Hub to see that Plateau has a massive presence of the Digital Bridge Institute.”

Calling on policymakers, Daser urged the government to design policies that enable innovation to thrive. “Let’s create an enabling environment and design policies that help technology and tourism to flourish,” he said.

For him, Plateau is no longer “just another location on the Nigerian map,” but a potential hub of innovation. “It has the raw materials needed for innovation,” he said. “The task is to build platforms that connect our local economy to the global market, to move ideas into impact.

For him, Plateau is more than a dot on the Nigerian map. “It has the raw materials needed for innovation,” he said. “The task is to build platforms that connect our local economy to the global market — to move ideas into impact.”