As countries invest billions of dollars in digital connectivity, critical gaps remain in understanding how infrastructure actually works as a system. Nigerian-born technology leader Ogaba Joseph Attah is working to close that gap through a new category of innovation known as infrastructure intelligence.
Currently based in the UK, Attah is the founder and CEO of Nexintell Ltd, a technology company that builds advanced decision-making systems for governments, regulators and infrastructure operators.
Its flagship platform, Infralytics-GIIS (Global Infrastructure Intelligence System), is designed to help institutions make better decisions about where and how their digital infrastructure is built, managed, and financed.
For Atta, that journey began far from boardrooms and data centers. Growing up in rural Nigeria, he developed an early interest in technology by taking apart broken radios to understand how invisible signals carry sound over distance.
That curiosity evolved into a career dedicated to building and improving the invisible systems that now support the modern economy.
From 2018 to 2025, Mr. Atta was the Founder and CEO of Evolve Digital Africa, where he led an infrastructure program that delivered over 150 kilometers of fiber optic network and connected over 1,000 homes, schools, businesses and government agencies.
His work has extended beyond Nigeria, including participating in the development of a secure IoT-enabled correctional facility in Equatorial Guinea, working with technology partners in Kenya, Israel, and Germany.
Alongside providing infrastructure, Attah has also invested heavily in developing human capital. Over the past decade, he has trained and mentored over 2,000 young professionals in fiber optics, networking and digital skills, contributing to the growth of Africa’s emerging technology workforce.
But his experience revealed a deeper systemic problem. While infrastructure deployment is accelerating globally, decision makers often lack the integrated intelligence needed to deploy capital efficiently.
“Industry research estimates that $700 billion of telecommunications infrastructure is underutilized or duplicated worldwide, even though approximately 3 billion people remain offline.
“This contradiction is exactly what Infralytics-GIIS seeks to address. Unlike traditional mapping and reporting tools, this platform is built to model relationships, dependencies, and tradeoffs across digital infrastructure systems.”
“By turning fragmented data into structured, explainable intelligence, we aim to support more effective planning and investment decisions, especially as the world seeks to mobilize the estimated $428 billion needed to achieve universal connectivity by 2030,” he said.
Atta explains that the platform’s mission is to make infrastructure “easy to read and decision-making”, helping leaders understand not just where their assets reside, but how they interact, where the vulnerabilities are, and which investments will deliver the greatest social and economic benefits.
His work reflects a broader shift in viewing infrastructure not just as a physical asset, but as an interconnected system that shapes a nation’s development, inclusiveness, and competitiveness.
From dismantling radio in rural Nigeria to designing intelligence systems for a global digital infrastructure, Attah’s journey shows how local curiosities can evolve into solutions with international impact.
As countries across Africa and beyond accelerate their digital transformation efforts, innovations like Infralytics could prove essential to expanding connectivity not just faster, but smarter and fairer.
