Nigeria is positioning itself as a major player in Africa’s fast-evolving technology landscape, according to Dr. Bunmi Ajala, National Coordinator of the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR).
Speaking to Vanguard on the sidelines of Moonshot 2025, Dr. Ajala described Nigeria’s progress in emerging technologies as “evolving but full of promise.”
“I will rate it as emerging, because the technology itself is evolving, and I am not talking specifically about the area of artificial intelligence,” he said.
“We have gotten institutions in Africa that have done research, like a place in South Africa, they were leading in machine learning. You come to Nigeria, where we have skillful youths who are working very well in the tech system.”
He noted that Nigeria and Kenya are leading destinations for foreign direct investment in Africa’s start-up ecosystem, adding that several African countries are already deploying innovative solutions in various sectors.
“In terms of applications, we have seen in cases of Nigeria, where solutions have been deployed in areas of agriculture, education, and healthtech. We have seen a lot from Ghana in health tech. We have seen sustainability from Kenya and Togo. The technology is evolving daily, but we can say that technology is emerging in Nigeria.”
On the continental front, Dr. Ajala commended the African Union’s continent-wide strategy for artificial intelligence, describing it as “a good initiative, which Nigeria is part of.”
He added that Nigeria has gone a step further by creating what he described as “the first procreated national AI strategy in the world,” developed through a collaborative approach involving global and African experts.
“When you look at the pillars from that, moving from the infrastructural ecosystem development, sectoral adoption up to ethical development and governance framework, you could say Nigeria is on the right track,” he stated.
“But moving beyond that is what Nigeria has done — setting up the AI collective, which is a community of parties to ensure that this technology is not just observational. But we are participating in developing and deploying this technology.”
Dr. Ajala further disclosed that the federal government has approved the establishment of the AI National Trust, a framework designed “to ensure the sustainability of this technology and ethical development.”
According to him, Nigeria’s digital transformation efforts are anchored on three core policy pillars: skills development, connectivity, and partnerships.
“Those are the areas of intentional initiative designed to ensure the Nigerian youths can play at an international level,” he said. “The next one is connectivity, that is, where you know the foundation of these technologies, whatever you are thinking of, you can have access to them, as they are reliable and
affordable. This is extending Nigeria’s backbone.”
He also highlighted Nigeria’s growing collaboration with global technology partners.
“Our partnership with international organisations is one area where we have a good partnership with all the tech. Talking about AWS, Google, Microsoft, H Foundation, EU and FCDO — these are all the partnerships we’ve built to make sure Nigeria is not left behind when it comes to adoption and application of these technologies.”
Emphasising the need for collaboration, Dr. Ajala said ecosystem development remains critical to sustaining innovation.
“For ecosystem development, this is very important for you to bring people together and share knowledge, even for us to understand what the government is doing, for them to get feedback on what strategy is working on,” he explained.
He added that recent gatherings in the tech space have helped unify efforts across sectors. “What an event like this has done is to bring all the stakeholders together all under one roof, and we have different sessions, so you can move from sectoral adoption to governance area to job creation to capacity development. If you look at the ecosystem, this allows stakeholders to meet and for the basic part that will come together for us to have a deep conversation,” he said.
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