There is an increasing wave of national and regional efforts to develop frameworks for the governance of AI and to support AI research and development. While states like the US, China, the UK, the EU, and other digital superpowers have headlined these moves, a few African countries have thrown their weight into the ring, signalling a state-level interest in investing in AI. Nigeria is one of these few countries. But what is the state of Nigeria’s commitment to AI?
Let’s backtrack a bit, starting with some of the earliest interventions on record.
2017 to 2021
In November 2020, Nigeria’s former Information Communication and Digital Economy (FMICDE) minister, Isa Pantami, commissioned the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR), marking a major moment for state-level commitment to AI, not only for Nigeria but also for the continent – as the centre was the first of its kind in Africa. The event marked a critical moment after years of talks on AI by Pantami’s predecessor and following the technology and innovation roadmap of the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2017, where AI was identified as a foreign direct investment (FDI) strategy. The NCAIR was established in line with the country’s National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy 2020 – 2030 (NDEPS) launched a year earlier which listed AI as one of the eight pillars of the country’s digital economy.
Since the establishment of the centre which marked the country’s entry into an era of AI normative emergence, mainstreaming AI has featured more prominently in government policy efforts. In 2021, the NCAIR began a programme to equip children with coding and ML skills, and to make them conversant with AI and other emerging technologies. In the same year, the Pantami-led ministry directed the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to provide AI research grants to tertiary institutions to drive innovation and improve economic resilience.
2023 to Date
Pantami’s last stride in the AI space was the draft of the National AI policy in March 2023, co-created by the National Information Technology Development Agency and scores of industry experts, following in the steps of other African countries, like Mauritius and Tunisia.
Building on the existing AI policy efforts, in August 2023, the new Communications and Digital Economy Minister, Bosun Tijani, released a white paper announcing steps to expand on the draft by engaging top AI researchers of Nigerian descent globally in the process of crafting a comprehensive National AI Strategy. This came on the heels of the 2023 Data Protection Act, a more comprehensive legislation which replaces the earlier 2019 Data Protection Regulation (DPR).
It is uncertain how instrumental the 2023 DPA and earlier DPR and the Data Operability Standards, 2016 are to the government’s current AI policy efforts. For one, the 2023 DPA makes no mention of AI-related data concepts like ‘Data mining’ ‘Anonymisation’ or ‘Models’, but it does touch on crucial issues like data security and cross-border data transfer – both essential pillars for developing AI models.
Training and education is one major area the current minister has focused his AI development efforts on. While earlier efforts like the 2021 Digital States Initiative by NITDA in partnership with Microsoft (as part of the implementation strategies of the NDEPS) trained and equipped 20,000 young people with digital skills, these mostly lacked an explicit focus on AI.
In October 2023, the FMICDE launched the 3 million Technical Talents (3MTT) programme, designed to train three million young people in core digital domains – including AI – for four years. This comes after a similar programme launched by the NCAIR in August, 2023 to train one million AI developers. To emphasise its prioritisation of AI, the Ministry mandated the one million applicants for the first phase of the program to take an introductory course on AI.
In the same vein, the country has shored up efforts to mainstream AI through R&D schemes. In October 2023, the ministry launched the Nigeria Artificial Intelligence Research Scheme (NAIRS), a N225 million grant for 45 AI startups and researchers as part of efforts to position the country as a global hub for the application of AI technology and drive innovation in critical sectors. In December, the grant was awarded to various initiatives applying AI to critical sectors like health, agriculture and education. A similar effort – the Fourth Industrial Revolution Technology Application (4IRTA), launched in November 2023 and jointly implemented by the FMICDE and the Ministry of Agriculture is supporting 10 startups to apply innovative solutions in AI, UAVs, and Blockchain to Nigeria’s agriculture sector
But Nigeria’s AI policy efforts extend beyond the domestic. In November 2023, it was one of 28 others, including the UK and France, that signed the Bletchley Declaration on AI, pledging commitment to its development with key attention to international collaboration to mitigate risk. In the same vein, Nigeria was one of 18 countries that adopted a new US-led global coalition to ensure AI is secure by design.
The year 2024 has seen a renewed commitment to AI policy, with the Communications and Digital Economy Ministry convening a National AI Strategy Workshop towards the development of a fresh National AI Strategy document. One expects this new round of strategy to incorporate new ideas, especially following recent developments (the generative AI boom) since the last strategy was written.
Despite these pockets of growth spread across the past few years, the country’s commitment is nowhere close to what is needed, at least not yet. This is evident in where it currently ranks compared to similar countries. While some of its methodologies may be questionable, the Oxford Insights 2023 AI Readiness, which ranks countries according to 3 key indicators – ‘government readiness’ (AI strategies), ‘the technology sector’, and ‘data and infrastructure’ – places Nigeria in the 103rd position among 193 countries globally. Even though the country intends to achieve a top 50 rank by 2030, there’s much more that needs to be done.
Moving Forward
A couple of points are crucial for a more robust policy response. First is the data and infrastructure pillar. In addition to AI specific infrastructure such as compute (data storage systems, cloud services, etc), traditional infrastructure such as broadband networks and electricity are fundamental to AI development. The scale of data needed to power a home-grown AI model is huge, and at the moment, the Nigeria government is the singular entity with the resources and power to stimulate nationally representative data collection efforts. Evidently, the identity management process embarked on by the country over the past few years which now covers at least a hundred million people is a good starting point; however, it is challenged by poor data accessibility and interoperability. This is evident in the duplicity of efforts to collect citizens’ identity, with the NIMC repeatedly requesting citizens to link separately existing banking and passport data to the national identity data, despite the latter being already a requirement for banking and passport services registration. It is also important that such data is accessible to the private sector to create value added services.
Another key component that requires attention is the ‘technology’ indicator of AI readiness, powered by a vibrant private sector. Of the 3 AI readiness indices, the technology pillar has the lowest score, which is surprising given Nigeria’s very vibrant tech ecosystem. Aside from the fact that providing critical infrastructures will aid AI development, the country must strategically invest in AI innovative endeavours. Of course, the NCAIR and the recent research grants are a good starting point but there must be a clearly defined target for these moves in terms of output because, for instance, the output of a similar grant released by the last administration did not produce any publicly available outcome.
The Nigeria government must leverage the country’s already vibrant position in fintech, e-commerce and logistics tech to support AI-powered solutions in the broader tech sector. One key thing the government could do here is to significantly increase its financial commitments to the tech sector. Even though recent moves suggest that it understands this need, there is still so much to be done. For context, Nigeria’s technology ecosystem is heavily reliant on funding from abroad and investors US investors alone are responsible for 60 percent of venture capital and 80 percent of the country’s startups are formally incorporated there. The problem with this is that AI represents an avenue for the country to be at the forefront of critical developments that will shape the future of humanity but if the ecosystem that produces this is heavily reliant on foreign investors without significant government input, the intellectual capital, proprietary assets, and data would be mostly domiciled outside the country, undermining economic gains for the country.
Next, even though the government has evidently increased its investment in the education component of AI over the past two years, it must go beyond merely organising training sessions to providing an enabling environment for young people to actively participate in the innovation of AI across the country. The government must also update the education curriculum in the country to reflect emerging technologies like AI to stimulate interest and equip students with the fundamentals required for them to be able to participate in the innovation process.
Finally and perhaps most important is the political factor. Poor coordination and policy churn have largely characterised government strategies in Nigeria. Between 2017 and now, there have been at least a dozen digital economy-related policy strategies led by different but interrelated agencies. Some of the current AI efforts are directly under the supervision of the minister’s office in coordination with NITDA, but key agencies like the NCAIR, the NCC, and even the NMIC would play different but interconnected roles in delivering a vast AI ecosystem. Hence, inter-agency collaboration is important. Policy longevity is equally crucial. To begin, it is important to institutionalise ongoing AI efforts beyond the remit of the minister. It might be useful to either establish a separate AI-focused agency (as we see in other countries) or to expand the scope of the NCAIR to house broader AI-related policy activities – including research on ethics, safety and governance, as well as AI R&D scheme. This will ensure that ongoing policy efforts outlive subsequent political cycles.