Access Is Not Enough

In 2024, a Nigerian farmer increased his crop yield by 20% using AI-powered recommendations from an agritech app. That same year, a Nigerian cartel used AI-generated video and voice cloning to impersonate a government official and extract funds from an international NGO. The difference between the two cases was not the AI. It was the human capacity to engage it critically.

The Nigerian Government promises to make AI a tool of national development. The gap between that promise and what is actually happening in the country is not because of lack of frameworks or policies. Rather, it is the lack of AI literacy. NAIS (National AI Strategy) and NDEPS (National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy) are frameworks that exist, administered by NITDA (National Information Technology Development Agency), but they assume that access produces literacy, which is not true. There is no institutional mechanism that ensures an ordinary Nigerian can critically evaluate the AI they come across. And without that capacity, that Nigerian, instead of benefiting from AI, becomes a target of it. AI cannot serve Nigeria's public good until institutions, not just individuals, are made accountable for building AI literacy into how Nigerians are educated, governed and protected.

This essay argues that Nigeria's existing frameworks do not fail because they are absent, but because they treat literacy as a byproduct of access rather than a precondition for it. And that institutional accountability is the necessary corrective.

AI may sound like the future, but for many Nigerians, AI is already a part of their daily life. We see AI being used by banks and fintech platforms to flag suspicious transactions protecting their users from scam. We see the rise of chatbots and customer support. According to the Our Life with AI 2025 report by Google and Ipsos, 88% of Nigerian adults now use AI chatbots, with Nigeria ranking first globally in AI usage for learning, work and entrepreneurship. This adoption rate, which marks an 18-point increase from 2024, far exceeds the 62% global average.

Despite the rising use of AI in Nigeria, according to NBS 2022 data, Nigeria has 37% internet penetration in rural areas and over 60% in urban areas. This data shows us that AI is being used more in urban cities like Lagos, Abuja etc but it also tells us that the majority of the rural areas are excluded from AI advancements creating an inequality. This divide tells us AI's current benefits are geographically and economically concentrated, which means literacy infrastructure, when built, must be built with that gap in mind.

If Nigerians use AI without proper literacy, critical frameworks or institutional guidance, it can create more harm than good by widening social gaps, weakening honest work and giving outsiders control over data. The 2024 deepfake cartel fraud, where a cloned government official's voice was used to extract funds from an international NGO, is one example of what AI without institutional accountability costs.

The question for Nigeria is no longer whether AI will be adopted as it already has been. The question is whether that adoption is happening with enough literacy, structure and institutional accountability to prevent it from doing more harm than good.

UNESCO's AILit Framework defines AI literacy as "a blend of knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable learners to engage with AI responsibly and effectively." In Nigeria's current reality, this blend is not evenly spread. People are learning the “how” (skills), but not enough of the “why” and “should we” (ethics).

Now, Nigeria already has a high usage of AI. Without proper literacy on the "responsible and effective" part UNESCO describes, this high usage is already turning into a liability affecting education, business safety and national development. Students are relying on AI instead of thinking, businesses expose their own data at risk and the economy is losing strategic control and opportunities. At Rev. Fr. Moses Orshio Adasu University in Makurdi, a 2025 study of 392 undergraduates found 81.6% awareness of AI tools, with 38.3% using ChatGPT frequently for assignments, summaries, and idea generation; 30.6% reported it reduced their thinking effort, and 40.8% believed long-term use weakens critical thinking skills.

The biggest responsibility lies with institutions that introduce AI without proper education, because they control how people access and use the technology. An institutional mechanism for AI literacy in Nigeria can be introducing AI studies into secondary schools. For example, HammetLabs is an EdTech Startup building a structured AI Studies curriculum for Nigerian secondary schools, with institutional credentialing built in.

If Nigeria builds more infrastructure, gets better broadband, and passes more AI policy, but still does not build institutional AI literacy, the realistic 10-year outcome for the average Nigerian's relationship with AI would be a highly superficial and dependent one. It'd make them dependent on foreign AI instead of building their own solutions. By 2035, a Nigerian graduate who has used AI tools throughout their time in school without structured literacy will sit down to solve a problem for their employer and reach for an AI tool before thinking for themselves, and in doing so, would be handing a foreign system both the answer and their employer's data.

Nigeria has NAIS, NDEPS, and the AU (Africa Union) Continental AI Strategy. These three all highlight ethical and responsible AI, but they don’t fully address how these ideas will be financed or implemented. No practical systems are laid out to bring their vision to pass. Specifically, no funds are allocated for the ideas to be implemented. The NAIS 2024 document contains no dedicated budget allocation for AI literacy programming.

Importing Western governance frameworks wholesale compounds this problem. Western AI governance frameworks like the EU AI Act and US AI Executive Order were built around Western infrastructure, Western institutions and Western user contexts. They are not well suited for Nigeria because it lacks the infrastructure, expertise and locally relevant data needed to support them. Most of the data is biased and doesn't fit Nigerian context. For instance, voice recognition or automated tools often fail to understand Nigerian-accented English or local slang and this creates barriers to technology adoption.

Closing Nigeria's AI literacy gap requires AI training for teachers made official through education policy, funded through UBEC (Universal Basic Education Commission) and enforced through TRCN (Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria) certification. The integration of local AI tools into curricula should be mandated through the National Council on Education (NCE).

The AU Continental AI Strategy talks about an "Africa-centric, development-focused approach." For Nigeria, this means developing AI systems that protect local data, support the economy, and fit its own realities, instead of copying or relying on Western models. Nigeria's specific reality includes a predominantly young population, high mobile penetration, low formal employment and oral communication traditions. Africa-centric for Nigeria means building AI that works in our languages. AI built in Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa directly addresses the rural exclusion the digital divide data revealed.

The single biggest reason Nigeria's existing AI frameworks remain documents rather than lived realities for ordinary Nigerians is that they are not backed by enforceable laws or the systems needed to make them work in practice. This absence is already costing Nigeria a generation that will use AI without understanding it.

The farmer and the cartel mentioned at the beginning of this essay did not have different technologies. They had different capacities to engage with the AI.

Nigeria's frameworks ( NAIS, NDEP, the AU Continental AI Strategy) are not short on vision. The real issue is poor sequencing. Infrastructure came first, but people were never taught how to actually use it. Access was treated as the end goal, not the beginning, and the result is a generation using AI without understanding it and becoming dependent on it.

The corrective measure to take is to enforce institutional accountability. This is done by NITDA mandating AI literacy metrics, UBEC funding teacher training and the NCE integrating local AI tools into curricula. Nigeria has the frameworks. What it needs now is the will to treat literacy not as the aftermath of access, but as its precondition.

AI will serve Nigeria's public good. But only if Nigeria decides, deliberately and institutionally, that every Nigerian deserves the capacity to engage it critically and not just access it.

P.S. This was my original essay submitted for BBDYI Competition 2026 on AI literacy, ethics, and responsible technology use. I didn’t win any monetary prize, but I had fun researching and learning about AI Literacy in Nigeria.