Nigeria’s digital free zone experiment: Can Itana succeed where others failed?

When Nigeria’s currency began stabilising this year after months of volatility, many observers were cautious about calling it a turning point. But for Itana, a privately-run digital special economic zone designed to attract tech startups, services companies, and foreign investors, the shift became a timely catalyst for investor commitment.

“Once someone decides to come into the country to find out for themselves, that’s one of the greatest signals,” says Nkechi Oguchi, Itana’s chief community officer. Over the past year, she says, interest has shifted from casual inquiries to founders and investors physically visiting Lagos to evaluate the ecosystem. Improvements in visa processing have helped; so has a more predictable FX regime.

Touted as Nigeria’s first fully operational digital free trade zone, Itana’s growing pull offers a contrast to many other zones across the country that remain underdeveloped or inactive. It emerges as a reference point for what policy certainty and execution can unlock in Nigeria’s broader free zone experiment. 

Itana, which says it now hosts about 50 companies since it began operations in September 2023, is positioning itself as the 21st-century successor to Nigeria’s traditional free zones—structures that have historically catered to oil, gas, logistics, and heavy manufacturing. Itana seeks to serve digital businesses that prioritise seamless onboarding, virtual company formation, flexible capital movement, and a policy environment aligned with tech-driven scaling.

Itana’s users echo this sentiment. “Overall, it has been a very positive experience for us,” says Varun Giridhar, CEO and founder of Circular Energy, a sustainable energy solutions company that focuses on Battery-as-a-Service, which moved to Itana in 2025. “The Itana team has been beneficial and responsive. It makes a big difference when you feel like there are real people on the other side trying to help you get things done rather than slow you down.”

A zone designed for new economy companies

Nigeria has between 42 and 52 licenced free economic zones, but only around 22 are active. Many, such as the Abuja Technology Village Free Zone (2007), Olokola Free Trade Zone (Ondo & Ogun States, 2004), and Centenary Economic City (FCT, 2014), were launched during periods of strong economic growth but now face challenges such as stalled infrastructure, low activity, or weak governance. Between 2000 and 2014, Nigeria’s economy grew at an average real GDP rate of 6–7% annually, with some years even reaching double-digit expansion, creating the optimistic environment in which these projects were initially conceived. This history raises a common question: Is Itana another flash in the pan?

Oguchi acknowledges the concerns but says comparing Itana to older zones misses the point.

“Most of the regular special economic zones were designed for traditional businesses like oil and gas, manufacturing, and heavy industry,” she explains. “Itana is designed for a different set of businesses: startups and service-based companies that need intentionality in building an environment that is suitable for them.”

Itana’s model is particularly advantageous for companies like Circular Energy, Giridhar notes. Though his company is registered in the zone, it is not required to operate physically from it. “We run most of our day-to-day work from Lagos Island,” he says. “In a city like Lagos, that makes life a lot easier and saves huge amounts of time on commuting.”

Nkechi Oguchi explains that while Itana is privately owned, it operates under a 35-year-old Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA) framework, which has endured through multiple administrations and cannot be easily overturned by any government.

What’s driving the surge in interest

Itana’s growing appeal is being driven by a surge of interest from three key groups: African diaspora founders, foreign founders and investors, and local Nigerian startups seeking more predictable operating conditions. According to Oguchi, nearly half of the companies in the zone are owned by members of the diaspora, while roughly a quarter are led by foreign founders or investors. 

“People leave, but people are also coming back,” Oguchi says. “They are seeing signs of stability and projections for what Africa could be.”

Foreign companies like Circular Energy say the structure addresses friction that typically deters investment. “From a business point of view, the forex access and repatriation framework is a big plus for us,” Giridhar says. “We are deploying dollar capital into Nigeria. It gives our investors more comfort and removes a lot of the uncertainty around moving money in and out.”

Itana has amplified this momentum through its “Doing Business in Africa” tours, which bring investors into Lagos for curated deep-dive sessions. The first tour welcomed a single visitor, while the most recent in October—organised as part of Moonshot by TechCabal—hosted 15 participants, with another group scheduled for December.

The tours are already yielding real outcomes, according to Oguchi. She disclosed that one foreign investor who attended hired Nigerians to make up 80% of his global team after seeing the quality and cost efficiency of talent firsthand.

Inside Itana’s incentive stack

One of the key incentives Itana offers is its FX flexibility. Companies operating in the zone can legally hold multicurrency accounts, collect revenue in dollars or any currency they prefer, retain capital for as long as they choose, and repatriate 100% of their investment when exiting. In an ecosystem where startups are often constrained by FX shortages, these provisions are highly significant. 

“You can collect your revenue in USD, keep it in USD, and repatriate your capital when you need to,” Oguchi explains. “It makes companies more attractive to investors.”

Businesses operating within the zone benefit from a suite of corporate tax reliefs and exemptions from selected federal and state levies, lowering operating costs and improving long-term viability. These incentives typically include waivers on:

• the standard 30% Companies Income Tax (CIT), 
• the 7.5% Value Added Tax (VAT) on goods and services—including imports into the customs territory,
• withholding tax (WHT) of about 2.5–10% on payments such as services, rent, interest, and dividends, 
• the 10% Capital Gains Tax (CGT) on asset disposals, federal stamp duties, and 
• the 3% tertiary education tax on assessable profits.

They can also import equipment and tools duty-free, a boost that improves cash flow and makes early-stage scaling less capital-intensive. These incentives help create a more predictable and supportive environment for growth-oriented digital companies.

In Nigeria’s broader business landscape, founders often have to navigate a maze of regulatory bodies—from the Corporate Affairs Commission and Federal Inland Revenue Service to immigration services, the Central Bank of Nigeria, National Information Technology Development Agency, and several others. Itana simplifies this complexity by centralising these interactions into a single interface. 

“You only need to engage with Itana,” Oguchi explains. “We take the operational headaches and deal with the agencies to ensure you’re compliant.” This streamlined process is particularly beneficial for fintech companies, many of which require numerous licences that typically take months—sometimes over a year—to obtain. Itana says it is actively advocating for policy reforms to shorten regulatory approval timelines.

The zone is also developing a physical district designed to offer the infrastructure essential for modern, high-performance businesses. This district aims to provide stable power, high-speed internet, security, and a community-focused layout that supports collaboration and growth. Oguchi likens the vision to what made Silicon Valley successful: a deliberate mix of strong educational roots, reliable infrastructure, and a concentration of skilled people. “That is what we’re trying to build,” she says.

Can the Itana model outperform traditional zones?

Nigeria’s free zones have attracted more than $30 billion (₦43.5 trillion) in investment and delivered ₦650 billion ($448 million) in government revenue. They contribute meaningfully to industrial output, but their impact remains largely confined to manufacturing and oil-driven activity.

Two startup founders, who requested anonymity to speak freely, argue that the manufacturing focus is precisely the concern: free zones are optimised for capital-heavy industries—export factories, refineries, and logistics hubs—not for startups whose core assets are laptops, talent, and cloud infrastructure. 

“It’s very ambitious,” said one of the founders. “I’ve not seen it work anywhere before, and I don’t know how Nigeria/Lagos holds up to such promises, especially when a change of government (in Lagos) will happen in 2027.”

They also point to Itana’s location, noting that commute times could become a deterrent for workers whose companies choose to operate from the district.

Babatunde Akin-Moses, co-founder and CEO of Sycamore, a peer-to-peer lending platform, echoes this view, suggesting that free zones were never built with digital-first companies in mind.

“The free zone concept was originally meant to encourage exports,” he says. “For digital companies, it feels counterintuitive.”

While he acknowledges the tax advantages on offer, he questions whether the broader incentives translate into meaningful value.

“The FX benefits are not very clear. It’s still the same CBN—it’s not like the zone has its own central bank,” he explains. “And when you factor in the cost of setting up there, your tax bill has to be big enough for the relief to matter. Otherwise, the incentives don’t feel tangible.”

Akin-Moses adds that many Nigerian tech workers already operate remotely for foreign employers without relying on any free-zone structure.

“For physical businesses, free zones make a lot of sense—close to a port, lower duties, fewer levies,” he says. “But for digital businesses, the benefits are not yet clear or well-communicated. And individuals still pay personal income tax unless the zone says otherwise.”

His concerns reflect a broader sentiment among some founders: until the incentives become usable, verifiable, and cost-efficient, widespread adoption will remain limited.

Giridhar offers a contrasting perspective grounded in his company’s capital-intensive model. Circular Energy builds distributed energy-storage and battery-as-a-service systems for telecoms, data centres, cold-chain logistics, and healthcare. Nigeria’s unreliable electricity supply, he says, makes the country an ideal environment for innovation.

“Being based on the ground in Nigeria allows us to design solutions that actually work here,” he notes. “And the digital free-zone structure lets us raise capital and structure the business in a way that also works for international investors.”

Oguchi argues that Itana is being built around metrics that matter in a digital economy—revenue growth, job creation, talent export, and improved startup survival rates.

“We want your chances of survival to be better in Itana than anywhere else,” she says. “Funding should be easier, licences faster, partnerships more accessible.”

She adds that Itana is designed as a live–work–build district that supports a more balanced lifestyle for teams based on the site.

“For people choosing to commute from other parts of the city, there are options,” Oguchi says. “And ongoing upgrades to the road network will significantly cut travel times.”

Risk mitigated, not eliminated

Oguchi is clear-eyed about the limits of what Itana can control. When asked which risks the zone can genuinely eliminate, she is quick to clarify that no business environment is entirely risk-free. 

“No risk can be eliminated, but they can be reduced,” she says. Regulatory uncertainty, for instance, is softened by Itana’s grounding in NEPZA’s decades-old framework and by the zone’s ongoing engagement with government stakeholders. Infrastructure-related risks are being addressed through the development of the Itana District, which is designed to provide reliable power, connectivity, and secure facilities. Currency exposure is mitigated by allowing companies to operate multicurrency accounts and repatriate capital freely, while operational risks are reduced through Itana’s one-stop compliance model, which removes much of the administrative burden from founders.

Still, Oguchi acknowledges that some challenges remain firmly outside Itana’s reach. Policy shifts, economic volatility, and fluctuations in global tech funding cycles continue to shape the broader business landscape. These are risks the zone can help cushion but not eliminate.

Traditional FTZs often operated as enclaves with weak domestic linkages. Itana insists its model is different.

“There are no restrictions,” Oguchi says. “Companies in the zone can do business with anyone in Nigeria.”

Ultimately, Itana’s success will be judged not by ambition or headlines, but by whether it can turn stability into durable company survival, capital inflows, and jobs, while embedding digital firms into Nigeria’s wider economy rather than isolating them from it.