Nigeria wants to move beyond conventional IT outsourcing and position itself as a destination for AI-enabled services, NITDA director-general Kashifu Abdullahi told a “Hire from Nigeria” session on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
“Our opportunity is not simply to supply talent to the world; it is to equip Nigerian talent with AI, trusted digital infrastructure and globally competitive capabilities to deliver higher-value services to the world,” he said.
Abdullahi appeared alongside Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment Jumoke Oduwole and Minister of Education Moruf Alausa, in a session organised by the Nigeria Economic and Trade Advancement Programme.
Why the shift is urgent
The argument has a deadline attached that the session did not mention.
Research covered by iAfrica projected AI-powered automation could eliminate more than 40% of Africa’s business process outsourcing jobs, with women facing roughly 10% higher exposure because of their concentration in junior roles. The sector is projected to reach $35 billion by 2028.
Customer support, back-office processing and routine development — the work that built African outsourcing — is the work most exposed. Abdullahi’s pitch is that Nigeria should climb before the floor gives way.
What is being built
The infrastructure case rests on four elements:
- Project BRIDGE — 90,000 kilometres of fibre
- Cloud First Policy and sovereign cloud capability
- Frameworks covering data protection, digital identity, cybersecurity, data classification and software quality assurance
- The National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and the National AI Strategy
Nigeria also announced a National Digital Cloud Policy in August targeting $750 million in private investment within 24 months, with sovereignty provisions applying to defined categories of government and regulated data.
Those frameworks matter commercially. International companies placing AI work in a country need certainty about how data is handled, and regulatory clarity is part of the product.
Egypt is further down the same road
Nigeria is not alone in making this pitch, and its nearest competitor has figures behind it.
Konecta opened its first global generative AI centre of excellence in New Cairo in August, as part of a $100 million Egyptian investment, with vice chairperson Ahmed Al-Harrany stressing the distinction between a centre of excellence and an operational site. Deloitte has grown its Egyptian technology hub from 23 professionals to more than 900 and committed a further $80 million.
Egypt’s digital exports rose from $3.3 billion in 2018 to $7.4 billion in 2025. It placed 16th globally and second in Africa on the inaugural Ataraxis Global Outsourcing AI Readiness Index — behind South Africa in eighth.
Nigeria did not appear in the top tier of that index, though eight African countries made the global top 25.
The difference is not ambition. It is that Egypt has published export figures, headcount growth and named anchor tenants. Nigeria’s session produced none of those.
The representation argument
Abdullahi’s closing point was the more distinctive one.
Countries and communities poorly represented in AI training datasets, he warned, risk having their languages, economic realities and social contexts under-represented in systems that increasingly shape decisions.
That is not abstract for Nigeria. The country open-sourced N-ATLAS, its national language model covering Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian-accented English, and it now anchors the GSMA’s ATLAS Umoja initiative across five governments. Nigeria’s own minister told that launch that fewer than 2% of Africa’s languages receive meaningful support from modern AI platforms.
A country building language models has a different services proposition from one supplying labour — and that, rather than fibre kilometres, is the clearest version of Abdullahi’s argument.
“Nigeria should focus on developing people who can understand, shape and create with emerging technologies,” he said, “rather than limiting the country’s role to supplying labour for services designed elsewhere.”
What would make it measurable
The session set out no current outsourcing export figure, no target, no Project BRIDGE completion date and no skills numbers.
Nigeria has the pieces — 3MTT, the National AI Strategy, N-ATLAS, a cloud policy and a fibre programme. What it has not yet published is the baseline against which any of it would be judged.
Based on reporting by Punch.
