By Josephine Miller
An Artificial Intelligence (AI) system designer and filmmaker, Mr Onu Abrahams, has urged Nigerians to focus on turning local ideas into globally competitive products.
Abrahams said this during an exclusive interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Thursday.
He said Nigeria had a growing pool of talented developers but needed to create an environment where ideas could become sustainable, world class products.
“I don’t think Nigeria’s problem is a lack of talent. I mean, there are a lot of talented developers and founders in Nigeria.
“But the main issue is that we have not built an environment where ideas can be nurtured into world class products,” he said.
Abrahams said stronger funding for research and implementation, improved access to quality data and collaboration across sectors would strengthen Nigeria’s technology ecosystem.
He said the country also needed to move beyond consuming technologies developed elsewhere and begin to produce solutions based on its own realities and challenges.
According to him, Nigeria’s immediate opportunity is in developing practical applications rather than attempting to compete with countries investing billions of dollars in the infrastructure required to train large scale models.
“Right now, I believe our biggest opportunity is in building practical AI solutions.
“Training large models requires enormous computing power which Nigeria doesn’t have at this point in time because billions of dollars of infrastructure is needed,” he said.
The system designer said locally developed technologies could be deployed to improve agricultural productivity, support hospitals, strengthen public services and assist small and medium-sized enterprises.
He said that the technology itself should not be the primary focus, but the problem it was designed to solve.
“AI is the means to an end. So, you are not necessarily selling AI as a product but you are selling a solution,” he said.
Abrahams said Nigeria could learn from countries such as India and Singapore but should adapt their approaches to its own circumstances rather than simply copying their models.
“What I would borrow is India’s mindset around building for constraints because that is closer to our reality than people admit.
“And from Singapore, just the discipline of having clear rules early, even if we cannot match their budget or size,” he said.
Abrahams said Nigeria’s approach should be more bottom up, with technology builders taking the lead while government provided the necessary support.
He said the ultimate measure of Nigeria’s progress in the sector should not be the number of technology users or startups but the number of locally developed solutions addressing problems Nigerians faced.
“If I had to pick one, it’s locally built solutions not users, not even startup count.
“You can have millions of users and still be entirely dependent on tools built elsewhere; solving someone else’s problems is first,” he said.
He said Nigeria’s success would depend on its ability to develop solutions for areas such as agriculture, healthcare access and informal sector finance in ways that responded directly to local needs.
“What actually matters is whether we are building things that solve our problems in agriculture, healthcare access, informal sector, finance and in ways nobody else was going to build for us,” he said.(NAN)(www.nannews.ng)
Edited by Uche Anunne