News
Nigeria to set up new research centers for AI, Blockchain, IoT and more
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) of Nigeria has plans revealed establish research centers for emerging technologies in the six geopolitical zones of the country.
Technologies include artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain, aimed at creating a technological research ecosystem.
Promote innovation and development
Kashifu Inuwa, The Director General of NITDA announced the initiative at the IoT West Africa conference held in Lagos.
Represented by Aristotle Onumo, NITDA’s director of corporate planning and strategy, Inuwa stressed that the new research centers are in line with the agency’s mission to support technological advances and economic growth.
These centers will serve as innovation sandboxes, allowing innovators to develop practical use cases, launch businesses, and bring their products to market.
The initiative focuses on several key areas: IoT, blockchain technology, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence and robotics.
NITDA’s support extends to Nigerian startups developing products in these cutting-edge sectors, enhancing the country’s technology landscape.
Building Technical Talent
Highlighting the agency’s new SRAP 2.0, which is based on 8 pillars, Inuwa said, “we look at digital literacy from the perspective of ensuring Nigerians use information technology safely and responsibly and we have a target of achieving 95% digital literacy by 2030.”
“The second part is Talent and we started training with the 3MTT initiative. Our goal is to reach 3 million by the end of 2027 and the goal is not only to train but to connect them with jobs.”
In addition to the research centers, the Nigerian government recently launched its first large multilingual language model (LLM). This LLM will be trained in five low-resource languages and accented English, supported by 3MTT fellows.
Featured image credit: The Guardian Nigeria