The global surge in the adoption of Artificial Intelligence across various sectors is gradually gaining steam across Africa. In Nigeria, various reports have documented this growing adoption in sectors like health, education, and agriculture. But one critical area where AI is quietly making inroads and attracting far less attention is the civil society space.
In June, a letter from the Secretariat of Oyo East local government in Oyo State, Southwest Nigeria, publicly begging for funds to renovate its building complex became public. “We gladly accept material donations such as paints, cement, roofing sheets, office furniture, and floor tiles,” the letter read in part. The appeal left many residents of the Oyo East local government baffled, including Muiz Oyekola.
“The moment I saw the letter, I had many questions on my mind. Is it that the local government receives no allocation? Because what do you mean the Secretariat is begging for paints?” Muiz asked rhetorically when he spoke with Dataphyte.
In search of answers, he went online to ask Bimi, an AI-powered chatbot from BudgIT, how much his local government receives monthly. The answer shocked him: in April 2025 alone, Oyo East Local Government got N442 million from the N15 billion allocation distributed among the 33 LGAs in Oyo State. “I had no idea they got that much. All we ever heard before were complaints that they don’t get anything,” he said.
His realisation of the fiscal reality of his local government is the exact reason why BudgIT launched Bimi in April 2025 as a means to leverage Artificial Intelligence to democratise access to public data necessary for citizens to hold the government accountable.
AI for Democracy
Nigeria’s political history is deeply intertwined with that of its civil society, which has played critical roles, including ensuring its return to democracy in 1999. The role civil society played in ensuring the country’s democratisation was part of a global wave that made some scholars describe it as the domain that makes democracy work.
In a bid to live up to this cardinal responsibility, civil society organisations in the country have historically deployed various means. Over the past few years, the increasing role of digital technology across Africa necessitated a rethinking of how these organisations engage their politics, governance and democracy, spurring the adoption of digital technology as a major means. The impact of this adoption is evident across various spheres: elections, political engagement, and legislative responsibility, among others.
However, a new and more specific pattern of adoption is gradually emerging as civil society organisations have started embracing the use of Artificial Intelligence to strengthen democracy in the country. One of these application instances is Bimi.
According to BudgIt, Bimi is a tool designed to make governance more transparent by bridging the gap between complex government data and everyday citizens. It achieves this through the chatbot designed to simplify fiscal information through natural language processing (NLP) and AI analytics. “With Bimi, we are closing the gap between citizens and the information they need to hold the government accountable,” says BudgIt’s Country Director, Gabriel Okeowo.
Another civil society organisation prominently utilising AI to strengthen democracy is the Brain Builders Youth Development Initiative (BBYDI). One of the biggest problems confronting democracy in Nigeria is the low percentage of turnout recorded during elections.
Since Nigeria’s return to democracy, voter turnout has only increased from 52.26 per cent to 69.08 per cent between 1999 and 2003. In every subsequent election, it has decreased continuously — 57.53 per cent in 2007, 53.68 per cent in 2011, 43.65 per cent in 2015, 34.75 per cent in 2019, and 26.71 per cent in 2023.
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Concerned about this continuous decrease and its implications for Nigeria’s democracy, BBYDI conducted a nationwide research in 2018 to understand why citizens don’t vote.
“If democracy is all about participation and engagement, then voter apathy is a real concern. It means governance will continue to be decided by one-third, or even less, of the Nigerian voting population. That was what led us to carry out our survey. From that report, we discovered a critical factor contributing to voter apathy: misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation,” BBYDI’s Executive Director, Abideen Olasupo, explained.
Following the findings, the organisation immediately got to work to combat the information crisis affecting voter turnout. However, during the 2023 general election, the widespread cases of fake news recorded made the organisation realise how critical it was to combat fake news with speed. “Manual fact-checking wasn’t fast enough,” Mr Olasupo recalled. “That pushed us to explore technological innovation. The 2023 election was a game-changer for us. The team started brainstorming on how to leverage artificial intelligence.”
“AI is not new, tools like Grammarly have used it for years. But with the rise of ChatGPT, we saw an opportunity to apply AI to fact-checking. After months of ideation and brainstorming, we launched MyAIFact-Checker with support from the US West African Tech Challenge.
Our AI engineers and data scientists worked on My AI Fact-Checker for 16–18 months before launch. The system leverages credible online sources, the advanced Google Search API, and crowdsourced debunks. It performs sentiment analysis (neutral, positive, or negative) and is available in French, Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo. It also supports voice-to-text for people with disabilities,” Mr Olasupo explained.
A Good Start
This new pattern of adoption by civil society organisations is an extension of the increasing use of AI in various spheres in Nigeria and across Africa. From Abuja to Abidjan, innovative efforts designed to tap into the ever-increasing potential of AI are on the rise. Education, health, supply chain, the list of sectors turning to this technology for efficiency is almost endless. The timing of its adoption by civil society organisations couldn’t have come at a better time.
Across West Africa and the Sahel, democratic societies are currently engrossed in a battle for their survival. Since 2020, there have been nine coups d’état across the region, five of which were successful. The most recent of these was the August 2023 removal of President Ali Bongo of Gabon in a palace coup. The coup in Gabon occurred just a few weeks after the July 2023 removal of Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum. Before Niger, Military officials had taken political control of Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Mali.
In 2023, the AU High-Level Panel on Emerging Technologies (APET) identified the significant role AI can play in resolving challenges like poor voter engagement and low voter turnout confronting elections on the continent. Aside from BudgIT’s Bimi and BBYDI’s MyAIFactChecker, various initiatives have emerged, largely at the civil society level, doing exactly this. Another example is the Voter Turnout Project, a Nigerian-based non-profit that deploys AI to identify unregistered citizens qualified to vote across the country, create a connection with them, and provide them with a simplified explanation of the procedure to register.
There’s also PODUS, an AI chatbot run by Citizens Gavel, a Nigerian civil society organisation, designed to provide easy and fast access to justice for Nigerians. The chatbot is designed to help bridge the access to justice confronting vulnerable Nigerians by pointing litigants in the right direction. The chatbot is specifically designed to prioritise cases of an emergency nature, police extortion, brutality, fundamental rights issues, illegal arrest, and illegal detention.
Similarly, Dataphyte’s Nubia leverages AI to help journalists and content creators analyse large datasets, transforming complex information into compelling stories and infographics. Nubia enables faster, data-driven storytelling, helping users understand governance and development issues through actionable insights.
This growing pattern of utilising AI by civil society organisations is a good start, says Senior Editor at TechCabal, Ganiu Oloruntade. “If we look at how transformative AI is, having civil society organisations leveraging it to strengthen democracy, accountability, and civic aspiration is a good start because it plays into the notion of trying to democratise access to government data, providing essential information that the public will find valuable. It shows that we’re exploring new use cases for AI, which is good.”
He noted that even though there are a lot of use cases for AI, within the context of trying to democratise access to government data or strengthen democracy generally, organisations have to start from somewhere.
Mr Oloruntade adds that, “the easier and more relatable use case is chatbots. It’s easier, a lot of people use them, and people interact with them daily. Is there a world where we can have more in-depth integration of AI into their work? Certainly. For instance, in elections, could AI be used in polling ahead of elections? Could it be used in real-time vote monitoring?
“So, the use cases are a lot, but like I said, it’s a good start. Other potential use cases can be explored. The critical thing is that the more we explore, the easier and more relatable ones, the more compelling reasons emerge to build other use cases,” Mr Oloruntade concluded.
Challenges Abound
While there are other yet-to-be explored ways that AI can be utilised for democracy in the country, current efforts face numerous challenges that threaten their effectiveness and the ability of civil society organisations to scale them for a larger impact.
BBYDI’s Olasupo identified a lack of adequate funding, limited technical capacity on the continent, data scarcity, poor data infrastructure, and ethical concerns as major problems confronting organisations utilising AI to strengthen democracy in the country.
These challenges mirror the same set confronting the utilisation and development of AI initiatives across various sectors in Nigeria, a reiteration of the structural and systemic issues encumbering the sector on the continent. Explaining the persistent nature of the issue, Mr Oloruntade explained that what is required to build an AI ecosystem is critical data and computing power, but in Africa, “we are still scratching the surface on compute, and even data itself.”
However, he maintained that civil society organisations should not worry too much about bigger structural problems, but rather work within the context of what is possible. “Within this reality, there are still easier use cases for AI. Building a chatbot is not as difficult as people think. Integrating AI tools into workflows, operations, or websites is achievable. What’s important is for organisations to work within their reality, as long as they have a clear sense of what they’re trying to achieve. The bigger problems, like data centres or infrastructure, are beyond civil society. They should focus on what is within their reach.”
