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The Future · Policy

Nigeria Wants a Sovereign AI. Its R&D Budget Tells a Different Story.

A homegrown multilingual language model, a top African ranking on responsible AI governance, and two AI bills waiting on lawmakers — Nigeria's AI ambitions are real. So is the fact that the country spends a fraction of what its stated goals would require.

The Gridline15 July 20267 min read

Nigeria Wants a Sovereign AI. Its R&D Budget Tells a Different Story. — illustrative image — Photo: theglobalpanorama (via Openverse) · CC BY-SA 2.0

Nigeria's case for taking African AI seriously does not lack building blocks. Awarri, a Lagos-based startup founded in 2024 and still at seed stage, partnered with the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy to build the country's first open-source multilingual large language model, an unusually ambitious technical undertaking in a country with more than 500 languages and dialects, most of them absent from the training data of every major global AI model. Awarri has followed that with two further data platforms, Langeasy and RootLens, extending the same sovereign-data logic: if global AI labs are not going to build for Nigerian languages and Nigerian data, Nigeria will build the tools itself. The country's National AI Strategy, meanwhile, has secured $3.5m in seed funding, including contributions from Awarri's own commercial arm, Awarritech, and the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.