Nigeria risks missing out on $15bn AI boom over skills gap

Nigeria may miss out on the $15 billion artificial intelligence (AI) boost due to digital skills gap prevalent among its youths, experts say.

With 70 percent of Nigerian citizens under 35 years and 3.5 million new labour-market entrants every year, Nigeria should be the natural winner in the global race for digital talent.

But the country is bleeding more than $11 billion annually from a skills deficit that is so severe that stakeholders now warn the entire $15 billion artificial-intelligence windfall projected for 2030 could evaporate if the government fails to act within the next five years.

Celine Lafoucriere, chief of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Lagos field office, said Nigeria sits at a critical inflection point where its young population could either drive an unprecedented digital transformation or deepen the country’s unemployment crisis if urgent reforms are not made.

“Nigeria’s youth should be its greatest asset, not its greatest challenge. But that will only happen if we equip them with the digital and AI competencies the future workforce demands. The economic potential is enormous, over $15 billion annually, but so is the risk of doing nothing,” Lafoucriere said.

The numbers are brutal. Findings by BusinessDay show that graduate unemployment has rocketed from under one percent in the 1970s to nearly 29 percent today. More than half of all young Nigerians are either jobless or trapped in work that barely pays subsistence wages, with 60 percent mismatch now existing between what universities produce and what employers actually need.

In primary schools, 96 children crowd around each working computer when there is a computer at all. In secondary schools, the ratio falls only marginally to 61.

Between 65 percent and 73 percent of public schools have no reliable electricity, effectively locking an entire generation out of the digital age before it has even begun. The regional fracture is even more alarming.

In the North-East and North-West, female computer usage hovers between half a percent and one-and-a-half percent. A man in northern Nigeria is five times more likely to have touched a keyboard than a woman living in the same region. In parts of the North, 61 percent of fathers actively discourage daughters from using digital devices, citing cultural or religious concerns.

“The result is a country that is simultaneously producing five of Africa’s seven unicorns and forcing millions of its girls to permanent technological exclusion,” Babagana Yahaya Aminu, education specialist at UNICEF, told BusinessDay.

Yet, the prize on the table has never been larger. “Sub-Saharan Africa will need 230 million digitally skilled workers by the end of the decade, and 28 million of those jobs will carry Nigerian postcodes,” he said.

“ Forty-five percent of all future employment on the continent will demand at least basic digital competence. Artificial intelligence alone could add $15 billion dollars a year to Nigeria’s GDP by 2030, an increase roughly equivalent to the current budgets of the ten poorest states combined.”

Google, Microsoft, Airtel, MTN, and Cisco are already lining up funds and infrastructure, waiting for a coherent national signal.

The solutions exist, and in some places they are already working. Lagos State, for instance, has embedded coding, artificial intelligence, and data literacy into the core curriculum from primary level upward. Teachers undergo mandatory retraining in AI tools, and the state’s Eko Digital initiative has pushed tablets and offline servers into remote riverine communities that commercial operators still consider unprofitable.

Martins Opeyemi, director of Planning, Policy, Research and Statistics at the Lagos State Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education, told BusinessDay that the state has embedded digital learning into the school curriculum under Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s THEMES agenda.

“We have made significant investments in teacher training and AI integration. For us, digital learning is no longer optional. It is the foundation for every child’s future,” Opeyemi said.

In Oyo State, the Nigeria Learning Passport, a UNICEF-backed platform that works with or without internet, has grown from 117,000 users in 2022 to more than two million today, delivering personalised lessons in mathematics, science, and employability skills to children who have never seen a textbook printed after 2005.

Rotimi Babalola, permanent secretary of the Oyo State Ministry of Information, said the state government recognises digital learning as a non-negotiable pathway to Nigeria’s economic future, while praising UNICEF’s support, noting that digital skills are essential to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4, which calls for inclusive and quality education.

Royal Ibeh

Royal Ibeh is a senior journalist with years of experience reporting on Nigeria’s technology and health sectors. She currently covers the Technology and Health beats for BusinessDay newspaper, where she writes in-depth stories on digital innovation, telecom infrastructure, healthcare systems, and public health policies.