Optimism about what AI can bring to Nigeria stems from recent history. From the liberalization of the telecoms market in the early 2000s to the spread of broadband internet to 44% of the current population, digital technology has boosted productivity and opportunity in the economy and increased Nigeria’s participation in the global labor market.
To raise AI into the public consciousness and seed future leaps in economic development, Nigerian policymakers should begin creating “small pockets of functional use,” says Oswald Guobadia, a former technology aide to Nigeria’s immediate past president. A strategic approach would be to evaluate AI’s application in recurring processes involving a large number of people, like getting national identity documents or decongesting markets, he said.
Some Nigerian startups are at the early stage of advancing AI adoption. Clafiya, a three-year-old health startup offering remote consultations with physicians and a savings account through an app, is working to test an AI-enabled WhatsApp chatbot for users next month. It wants to be able to offer predictive analytics on diseases in the near future.
But these ambitions depend on a massive increase in data and information availability in Nigeria, Clafiya’s co-founder and CEO Jennie Nwokoye told me. “We have to build that infrastructure, otherwise it seems we will be doing very surface-level AI,” she said. For Okolo, the Brookings fellow, the strongest signal of greater AI adoption in Africa would be increased government investments in digital and telecoms facilities.
