Adapting technological breakthroughs to the work of not-for-profits in Nigeria and many parts of the world, with a core focus on transparency, accountability, and improving public services, has been instrumental to the successes and impactful work of Civic Hive and BudgIT Foundation and similar organizations. BudgiT itself was born from a hackathon event in 2011 that sought to sieve new ideas from start-ups on how simple technological ideas can be used to change the delivery of good governance.

Since 2011, BudgIT has evolved into an organization churning out civic-tech products to enhance the delivery of its strategic goals and improve the capacity of the ecosystem of civil society actors leveraging civic-tech to better engage with their different mandates and projected outcomes. Recently, the world has been inundated with new technological advances, especially artificial intelligence.

The emergence of new forms of Artificial Intelligence has triggered a wide range of issues, including the projected upscaled positive as well as negative impact on diverse facets of human life, the ownership and regulation of AI products, ethical concerns about AI production, data management, use, and questions of accessibility and affordability around AI products.

Digging further into the Nigerian context, in a recent BudgIT commissioned and published research report, Civic-Tech Landscape in Nigeria: Understanding the Value-Add, Impact, Challenges and the Future, the state of civic-tech in Nigeria was described as ‘evolving’ according to respondents from the research, in the sense that the sector is brimming with potential and is yet to be fully harnessed. Despite commendable progress, a considerable untapped reservoir of opportunities could significantly benefit Nigeria and its citizens. Recognizing the strides made thus far, it is evident that realizing the sector’s whole potential hinges on the need for strategic changes, a deviation from business as usual, and more collaboration within the ecosystem.

Thus, within the Nigerian civic-actors ecosystem, especially those leveraging civic-tech options and products, there is considerable appetite and interest to understand emerging AI forms and the potential impact on their capacity to continue to deliver on their mandates. We see a possible path to chart here, one which begins with engagement within and with civic actors on understanding the basics with regards to AI in general and the emerging new forms, the existing AI forms and usability by civic actors, the current trends and lessons from other similar located countries and civic actors on the adaptability of AI products for their work. Additionally, it is crucial for civic actors to have a good grasp of the in-country state actors’ engagement in terms of policies, adaptations, and regulations of new forms of AI. It is crucial that civic actors and other relevant stakeholders with intentionality chart a co-created path to addressing the concerns around AI governance, especially disinformation and abuse of privacy and individual rights.

Investments in AI-based intelligent technologies in various areas, such as autonomous systems, recommender systems, biology, business, and politics, are at an all-time high. However, the main problem with AI systems is their learning structure, referred to as the black-box model. These commonly pre-trained models will analyze data through a complex mathematical structure and provide a concluding response as an output. The lack of explainability of these systems is problematic in light of their accountability regarding their decision to use different inputs. Consequently, questions about ethics, transparency, privacy, security, and fairness of the decision-making process will surface, which are some of the characteristics of responsible or ethical AI.

There is a critical role for regulators, in our context, the government, to work closely with AI stakeholders’ investors who are primarily in the private sector and not necessarily localized/domestically domiciled businesses, to probe the concerns raised with ethics, accountability, privacy amongst others with regards to development, release, and use of AI products. Presently, Nigeria is working to create a national AI policy. The current Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, had lent his voice to the issue, stating that Nigeria needed to develop a national strategy to harness the power of AI for sustainable development. He argued that with collaborative leadership, Nigeria seeks to pioneer ethical and inclusive Al innovation that improves welfare and expands opportunities for all its citizens.

Considering that a possible AI strategy for the country is still in the works, civic actors can explore opportunities to contribute their voices and thoughts to developing such a strategy. As the primary interface with citizens on a wide range of human rights, governance, and development issues, civic actors are well placed to bring their expertise to a critical issue such as AI in Nigeria.

In Nigeria, there is evidence of prior civic actors’ engagement on the questions of AI. As far back as 2020, the Nigeria Network of NGOs (NNNGO), with the support of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), convened a national conference, Artificial Intelligence and the Nigerian Nonprofit Sector: Challenges and Opportunities. It served as an opportunity for citizens and civic organizations to understand the AI landscape, its advantages and disadvantages, especially its impact on fundamental principles and rights, to think through potential solutions for creating trustworthy AI, including issues of trust and misinformation, explore a framework for the governance of digital technologies, open the door for collaboration and building a movement around trustworthy AI in Nigeria. The conference had projected that its major outcome would be its substantive contribution to the debate on developing an AI strategy by the third sector and the Nigerian government. Thus, there is a need to build on these previous efforts to revisit the importance of civic actors’ views and voices in developing a national AI strategy, especially regarding AI governance.

CSOs need to envision adapting and using new forms of AI to improve their work in all sectors of the economy and walks of life. This will require rapid improvements in knowledge about AI, skills, and capabilities in managing AI and investing in either enhancing the capacity of existing IT staff or embarking on new recruitments of AI-savvy technical experts.  We envision that civic actors will delve more deeply into using proven AI products to advance and enhance the use and impact of their civic-tech-enabled initiatives around access to justice, fiscal accountability, elections observation, service delivery monitoring, and budget analysis. A critical outlook for us is also seeing civic actors driving their energies into developing AI products suitable and adaptable to their country and thematic area needs.

Overall, we see that the combination and interaction of these three paths—civic actors’ in-depth review of their grasp of AI and what it means for their work, openness to adapting and innovating around AI, timely cohesion among the government, private AI-driven entities, and civic actors on the governance dimensions of AI—will require the intentionality with which all actors (notably civic and state) apply new AI forms to impact key governance and human development concerns positively. This will help enhance the realization of AI’s full potential in Nigeria.