Dr. Bosun Tijani, Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy of Nigeria;
Awarri, a Nigerian startup selected to build the country’s first AI, employs more than 500 associates in the federal government’s 3 Million Technical Talents (3MTT) programme. The purpose is to use cohorts as data collectors when building multilingual large-scale language models.
The Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, made this known on Wednesday, reiterating the government’s commitment to creating more jobs for Nigerians in the technology sector.
“This is a groundbreaking initiative that solidifies Nigeria’s position as an emerging leader in AI research and development in Africa,” Tijani said.
“Since its launch in November 2023, the Awarri team has grown to 120 staff, with over 500 fellows from the 3MTNigeria program joining additional data collectors to build Nigeria’s first multilingual large-scale language model. “I’m glad that I did,” he said.
According to the minister, Awari started operations in Ikorodu in November last year, employing 100 AI talent. He described the startup as a “full stack product from data collection to model creation to AI application development.”
“As we slowly but surely build the technical talent pool that will contribute to global AI development, we hope to see more companies join the space,” he wrote in a post on X/Twitter Wednesday night. I’m looking forward to it.”
Tijani announced the launch of Nigeria’s first multilingual large-scale language model in April.
He said the AI project was launched through a partnership between Nigerian AI company Awarritech, DataDotOrg, the National Information Technology Development Authority and the National Center for AI and Robotics.
“A large-scale language model will be trained in five low-resource languages and accented English to ensure stronger language representation in existing datasets for the development of artificial intelligence solutions. This project will also be supported by over 7,000 researchers from the 3MTT Nigeria programme,” the Minister said.
According to Tijani, the 3MTT program is an important part of the Renewed Hope agenda, which aims to build Nigeria’s technical talent backbone to strengthen the digital economy and position the country as a net talent exporter.
The program started with 30,000 Nigerians, 1% of the target of 3 million. An additional 270,000 people will be selected for the second cohort, bringing the total to 10%.
