By Emmanuel Ogbodo
The announcement of a N100 million AI Fund by Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, has triggered a wave of backlash from the tech community. The fund, backed by Google, is being criticised for its perceived inadequacy in addressing the country’s AI development needs.
Critics argue that the allocated N100 million (approximately $60,000) is insufficient to make any meaningful impact on artificial intelligence research or startup development. Many point out that individual startups often receive significantly larger grants from global initiatives, with some securing as much as $350,000 from Google alone.
Alex Onyia, CEO of the edtech startup Educare, expressed his frustration on X (formerly Twitter), highlighting the limitations of the fund.
“N100m cannot even buy Nvidia chips used for AI development. This is mere $61k in today’s naira, which isn’t up to the annual salary of a proper AI engineer. Let’s stop deceiving ourselves in this Nigeria. Unless it’s just using GPT4 or Gemini API’s which doesn’t require PR to use. Almost every mid-level software engineer in Nigeria uses that already,” he said.
Similarly, another critic, Jerry U., whose startup had previously received a $200,000 grant from Google, questioned the value of the initiative:
“My startup got a $200k grant from Google, but we are here launching an ‘AI fund’ and throwing a party for $60k. What kind of AI research can be done with $60k even if the whole fund was granted to a single startup?”
While some, like Gideon Ajose, praised the Minister’s efforts, they still criticised the fund for being too small to make a real difference in Nigeria’s AI landscape.
“Honestly, I applaud your efforts but this will not even move a needle in the AI needs of Nigeria.
“And it’s hurtful because if you weren’t in government and you were practicing privately, you’d never announce this. This is not enough to get started, we are too far behind!” Ajose noted.
The general consensus among stakeholders is that while the initiative is well-intentioned, the funding amount is far too low to address the hardware, data, and expertise required to support meaningful AI development in Nigeria.
