In the early 2000s, Olumide Balogun was writing code on paper as a third-year student at Obafemi Awolowo University in Osun State, Nigeria. He was taught Fortran 70, a coding language the rest of the world had long moved past. It wasn’t until he got his elder sister’s laptop in his fourth year that a world of possibilities opened up to him.
“It was a laptop that needed 10 hours to charge for two hours of uptime, but those were very cherished hours,” he told journalists at Google’s Lagos office on Tuesday. Today, Balogun is Google’s director for West Africa, a long way from the student copying syntax into a notebook, and he is determined that the next wave of Nigerian tech talent will not be held back by outdated knowledge in an age where artificial intelligence (AI) is redrawing every boundary.
It is part of why Google, through its philanthropic arm Google.org, is committing ₦3 billion ($2.08 million) to five Nigerian organisations to accelerate advanced AI skilling, push innovation, and strengthen digital safety over the next three years.
This initiative takes a different route from Google’s usual training programme, such as its 2023 skills sprint programme that trained 20,991 participants, including 5,217 women in AI & tech. Rather than running programmes outside formal education, the company is now going directly into Nigeria’s higher institutions, targeting the people who shape knowledge: lecturers and their teaching assistants.
In its draft National AI Strategy, the Nigerian government said it wants to reduce unemployment by five percentage points by equipping at least 70% of Nigeria’s young workforce (aged 16-35) with AI skills and knowledge.
In 2024, GSMA, the global body for telcos, reported that most Nigerian universities could not hire professors with real AI expertise, worsening a talent gap in a field projected to add $2.9 trillion to Africa’s GDP by 2030.
“In Kenya and Nigeria, the scarcity of professors with robust AI expertise and qualifications appears to be a significant challenge. Academic institutions typically lack the financial resources to recruit them, impacting the quality of courses offered,” GSMA said.
Balogun says Google’s investment is meant to close this gap.
“For the most part, we have been doing a lot of skilling initiatives outside of structured education environments. And we continue to do that,” he said. “With this new grant and investment, we are very focused on moving into structured environments to drive the deep learning and curriculum evolution that is required there. So it is not a replacement. It is an evolution of the skilling investments that we have made over the years.”
To pull this off, the funding will be spread across five non-governmental organisations: FATE Foundation, in collaboration with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), will embed an advanced AI curriculum directly into universities.
The African Technology Forum (ATF) will run an innovation challenge to help developers move from learning to building real-world products. Junior Achievement (JA) Africa will scale its internet curriculum for young people, and CyberSafe Foundation will strengthen cybersecurity capacity for public institutions.
According to Adenike Adeyemi, executive director at FATE Foundation, curriculum reform and institutional capacity are central to unlocking Nigeria’s economic potential. To achieve this, FATE and AIMS are collaborating with the University College London to adapt the Google DeepMind Research Foundation curriculum for use in Nigerian universities and polytechnics.
“Once the curriculum is ready, the next stage is to give the lecturers and their teaching assistants the knowledge and the capacity, not just to understand, but to be able to teach it,” she said.
Because lecturers are pivotal to this transformation, the train-the-trainer programme led by AIMS will be rigorous. Participants will undergo deep training, teach back the content, and complete a capstone research project tied to their course, institution, and local context. Only lecturers in STEM fields qualify.
The project aims to support at least 10 higher institutions, train 50 lecturers, 50 teaching assistants, and reach over 11,000 students in two to three years. Selected universities will also receive small grants.
“This is how it will be cascaded,” Adeyemi explained. “Curriculum development, capsule research at the end, wrap-around support, including mentoring, funding, technical assistance for the institutions that are selected, and also to the lecturers and their teaching assistants, and then the students who are then trained.”
Selected universities must show seriousness and have a base infrastructure to support the project.
In 2024, Google gave ₦2.8 billion ($1.94 million) to Data Science Nigeria to support the government’s AI-driven education push, targeting 25,000 teachers who would train 125,000 secondary school students.
With a median age of 18, Nigeria is placing its bets where it matters most: its young people. And as the global AI race accelerates, the race to upgrade Nigeria’s knowledge base, from outdated to frontier learning, has begun.
