Nigeria’s government is revving up its Artificial Intelligence (AI) efforts by announcing key partnerships with tech giants like Cisco and 21st Century Technologies. This move aims to solidify Nigeria’s position in the global AI race and boost its digital economy.

The announcement came after a 4-day National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (NAIS) workshop in Abuja. The workshop gathered over 120 researchers, practitioners, and organizations to craft a national plan for AI development.

Dr. Bosun Tijani, the Minister for Communications, underscored the importance of AI for Nigeria’s economic diversification. He highlighted AI’s potential to improve productivity in agriculture, public health, education, and more.

To achieve this, Nigeria is setting up several initiatives:

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  • Revamping the National Centre for AI and Robotics (NCAIR) with Cisco’s support. This will enhance NCAIR’s capacity to fulfill its mission of promoting AI research and development for national benefit.

  • Building a Nigerian multilingual large language model. This project will create a powerful AI tool that understands Nigerian languages, fostering innovation and development tailored to the country’s context.

  • Launching a national computing infrastructure pilot. Partnering with 21st Century Technologies, this pilot project will provide Nigerian researchers, startups, and government entities with the computing power needed for critical AI projects.

  • Forming the Nigeria AI Collective. This community will unite stakeholders across various sectors to leverage AI for shared prosperity and social good.

The NAIS workshop resulted in a draft national AI strategy document. This strategy outlines policies, investments, and an implementation plan to propel Nigeria towards an AI-driven economy.

Speaking on the the multilingual LLM, Tijani noted that the move aims to build the most robust Nigerian large language model.

The LLM will be trained on 5 low resource languages and accented english to ensure stronger language representation in existing datasets for development of Artificial Intelligence solutions.

To achieve this, the project will leverage the support of the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) programme Fellows to collate high quality Nigerian language data and fuel the development some of the most sophisticated AI models. The project is developed by Awarri in partnership with NITDA and DataDotOrg.

Overall, Nigeria’s AI push demonstrates its commitment to harnessing cutting-edge technology for national development. By collaborating with international partners, Nigeria aims to become a frontrunner in responsible AI development.