Nigeria is positioning its growing technology talent pool for a bigger share of the global digital services market, with the Federal Government pushing an AI-driven “Hire from Nigeria” strategy to create higher-value jobs and attract international businesses.
Director-General and CEO of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, made the case during a high-level “Hire from Nigeria” session held on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA81) in New York.
The session, organised by the Nigeria Economic and Trade Advancement Programme (NATEP), brought together government leaders and stakeholders to discuss impact sourcing, global trade, skills development and inclusive job creation.
Inuwa joined the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Dr. Jumoke Oduwole, and Minister of Education, Dr. Moruf Alausa, on the panel.
According to Inuwa, Nigeria’s opportunity goes beyond becoming another destination for traditional business-process outsourcing. He said the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence presents an opportunity for the country to compete in AI-augmented and IT-enabled services.
He said Nigeria must develop talent capable of understanding, building and applying emerging technologies to create economic value, rather than simply supplying labour to global markets.
Inuwa identified trust, security and regulatory certainty as critical to attracting global companies seeking to source digital services from Nigeria.
He highlighted developments around data protection, digital identity, cybersecurity, data classification, sovereign cloud and software quality assurance as important elements of Nigeria’s emerging digital-services infrastructure.
He also pointed to Project BRIDGE, which targets the deployment of 90,000 kilometres of fibre infrastructure, as well as the Federal Government’s Cloud First Policy and incentives aimed at encouraging investment in domestic computing infrastructure and AI factories.
The infrastructure push, he said, is essential to ensuring that Nigerian digital talent can operate on the scale and reliability expected by international clients.
Beyond skills and infrastructure, Inuwa stressed the importance of ensuring that Nigeria and other African economies are represented in the datasets and systems shaping the global AI ecosystem.
He said economies that are absent from the data used to develop intelligent systems risk being underrepresented in technologies that will increasingly influence economic and social activity.
Nigeria is therefore leveraging initiatives such as the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR) and the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy to strengthen indigenous AI capabilities and connect local innovators with global opportunities.
Inuwa said Nigeria’s proposition should ultimately be about exporting higher-value digital services, rather than merely exporting talent.
“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.”
The “Hire from Nigeria” push comes as AI reshapes the global services industry, increasing the premium on countries that can combine skilled talent, reliable digital infrastructure, regulatory trust and AI capabilities.
For Nigeria, the emerging race is not just to produce more technology workers, but to build the infrastructure and capabilities required for those workers to compete in the global AI economy.