How One AIG PLP Alumnus Brought Order to Lagos State's Outdoor Advertising Agency
Temitope Akande, Head of Client Registration, Lagos State Signage and Advertisement Agency (LASAA).
When a government agency cannot see what it is supposed to regulate, enforcement becomes guesswork. At the Lagos State Signage and Advertisement Agency (LASAA), records of licensed practitioners and billboard assets were scattered across formats, making monitoring and oversight nearly impossible.
Temitope Akande, an Aig-Imoukhuede Public Leaders Programme (Aig-Imoukhuede PLP) alumnus, changed that by building a digital system that brought every licensed practitioner and billboard asset in Lagos onto a single platform.
Lagos is one of Africa's most visually saturated cities. Billboards, signage, and outdoor advertising structures line its roads and skyline, but for years, Lagos State Signage and Advertisement Agency (LASAA), the agency responsible for regulating outdoor advertising in the state, had no clear picture of who was licensed to operate or how many structures existed.
Without a centralised database, LASAA could not easily determine the full scale of the industry's inventory. Monitoring and enforcement were reactive rather than systematic. For an agency responsible for regulating one of Africa's most commercially active outdoor advertising markets, this meant revenue leakage, uneven compliance, and limited capacity to plan for the sector's growth.
When Temitope Akande was appointed Head of Client Registration at the agency after completing the Aig-Imoukhuede PLP, he recognised that this was not just an operational challenge but a governance gap.
Armed with reform frameworks and systems-thinking tools acquired through the Aig-Imoukhuede PLP, he designed and implemented the LASAA App and Practitioner and Billboard Assets Directory. The platform enabled licensed outdoor advertising practitioners to register their companies and maintain up-to-date records of billboard assets, including their locations, specifications, photographs, and operational details.
The results have been tangible. LASAA now has a centralised, verifiable database of every licensed practitioner and billboard asset across Lagos State, replacing fragmented manual records with a system that supports faster, more accurate decisions.
Regulatory oversight has shifted from reactive to proactive. With real-time visibility into the outdoor advertising inventory, the agency can monitor compliance, identify gaps, and enforce standards with more precision. For a state where outdoor advertising is a significant commercial activity, that visibility directly strengthens the agency's capacity to grow its revenue base.
Practitioners benefit too. The platform gives them a compliant, digital space to showcase approved assets, raising the standard for how the industry operates.
The initiative has repositioned LASAA as a technology-driven regulator, aligned with Lagos State's agenda for digital governance.
What began as a data problem has become a governance solution. Temitope Akande's work at LASAA is an example of what is possible when public servants return from training not just with ideas, but with the tools and conviction to act on their ideas.