Nigeria's Strategic Push for AI Sovereignty in a Competitive Global Landscape
In October 2025, the University of Lagos made a landmark announcement by partnering with OpenAI to establish Africa's first OpenAI Academy. This academy is specifically designed to offer comprehensive AI learning and capacity-building programs for students, researchers, and professionals across the continent. This initiative directly supports Nigeria's National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, which emphasizes the development of local AI talent, robust infrastructure, and enhanced research capabilities. Complementary efforts, such as the AI scaling hub backed by the Gates Foundation, highlight a significant policy shift toward sustained investment in homegrown innovation.
Building AI Systems Rooted in Local Contexts
Nigeria's AI ambitions are deeply rooted in creating systems that accurately reflect local languages, cultural nuances, and societal realities. Within this framework, the OpenAI Academy at UNILAG, along with other AI-focused educational programs, is poised to strengthen the national strategy. By laying a solid foundation, these initiatives empower Nigerian and African engineers to design and deploy AI solutions tailored to their own communities, rather than merely adopting external technologies passively.
The critical question for Nigerian policymakers is no longer about whether to adopt AI, as that decision has already been made. Instead, the focus is on whether the nation will build indigenous AI capacity or rely on importing systems developed elsewhere. If importation is the route, the choice of partners becomes crucial. Many leading global AI systems offer advanced capabilities but are often optimized, governed, and economically anchored outside Nigeria's jurisdiction.
Emphasizing Local Control and Strategic Partnerships
An alternative model, exemplified by the OpenAI/UNILAG partnership, must prioritize in-country infrastructure, local data stewardship, and sustained capacity transfer. Merely having access to generative AI tools is insufficient; Nigeria needs to assume control over AI datasets and related resources. Currently, the global AI landscape is consolidating around two dominant poles: American companies leading in frontier models and Chinese companies expanding aggressively across Africa, often bundling AI with infrastructure investments that may seem attractive in the short term.
Nigeria's decisions in the coming years will profoundly shape its technological dependence for decades. Key considerations include the readiness to allocate resources for training AI and data engineers capable of building African-centric models, the organization of national data, Africa's preparedness to host its own data, and the ability to generate the substantial electricity required for AI and data engineering. These fundamentals are especially pertinent given Nigeria's young population and the contributions of its talent to international AI companies.
A Third Path: Sovereign AI Through Strategic Alliances
There exists a third path: building sovereign AI capacity through strategic partnerships that preserve Nigerian agency. Insights from research with Quantum Alliance, a Cambridge-based nonprofit collaborating with Harvard faculty on deploying breakthrough technologies in strategic industries, offer valuable lessons. Ujjwal Kumar, CEO of Quantum Alliance and co-founder of Cognisee, advocates for sovereign AI infrastructure, emphasizing that sovereignty does not imply isolation but rather the capacity to make informed choices.
Kumar notes, Nigeria has assets that create leverage, including mineral resources, a massive market, and a young population. The key is whether we use that leverage to build indigenous capacity or trade it away for short-term convenience. Cognisee's approach centers on artificial collective intelligence, which preserves and utilizes human expertise from communities often excluded from conventional AI training data. This ensures that AI systems reflect Nigerian contexts, as AI trained solely on data from wealthy countries may encode assumptions irrelevant to local realities.
Linking AI to Critical Mineral Development
This focus extends beyond technology into economic realms. Nigeria holds an estimated $700 billion in untapped critical minerals, such as lithium and rare earth elements, essential for batteries, electronics, and renewable energy systems. These minerals are at the center of a global contest for supply chain control. Countries that capture value from them will be those with the technical capacity to process, refine, and integrate these resources into finished products. AI-driven optimization, resource mapping, and processing efficiency will be decisive in this competition.
Kumar and Quantum Alliance work at this intersection, connecting AI capabilities with critical minerals development through partnerships with institutions like Stanford's Mineral-X program and Harvard's Salata Institute. This model offers Nigeria a blueprint: build indigenous technical capacity, engage in strategic partnerships, and ensure value creation remains as close to home as possible.
Key Pillars of a Sovereign AI Strategy for Nigeria
- Data Infrastructure: Nigeria must invest in collecting, curating, and protecting Nigerian data. This involves developing local cloud capacity, establishing data governance frameworks to keep sensitive information within national jurisdiction, and creating incentives for institutions to contribute to indigenous datasets.
- Talent Development: While Nigeria produces world-class AI researchers, structured pathways are needed to connect this talent with real-world problems. Initiatives like the Diaspora Connect platform and programs such as Q Fellows, which place students on strategic projects, provide adaptable models for Nigerian institutions.
- Strategic Partnerships: Nigeria should engage with partners who offer technology transfer and capacity building, not just finished products. Allied nations seeking supply chain diversification have incentives to develop processing capacity outside of China, positioning Nigeria as an active partner rather than a passive raw material supplier.
- Regulatory Clarity: Nigeria's National Digital Economy and E-governance Bill and AI oversight proposals are steps in the right direction. The goal is to create an environment where Nigerian AI companies can compete globally while ensuring foreign AI systems meet local standards.
Urgency and Opportunities in the AI Revolution
The window for action is narrow, as AI capabilities advance rapidly. Other African nations, such as Kenya developing its AI governance framework, South Africa attracting AI infrastructure investment, and Rwanda positioning as a tech hub, are moving quickly. Nigeria possesses unique advantages, including scale, resources, and a large domestic market, but these must be converted into outcomes through deliberate strategy and swift execution.
Nigeria has a precedent for success, as seen in the telecommunications revolution of the early 2000s, which transformed the economy by enabling indigenous players to thrive. The AI revolution presents a similar opportunity, but sovereignty must be actively built, not assumed. The convergence of national policy, academic leadership, and global partnerships signals a shift from consumption to creation, anchoring AI development in local capacity, relevance, and ownership.
By investing in talent, infrastructure, and context-driven innovation, Nigeria is laying the groundwork for an AI ecosystem that serves its people, advances inclusive growth, and positions the country as a credible contributor to Africa's and the world's AI future.
