Nigeria’s youth corps adds AI skills to national entrepreneurship training

Nigeria’s move to bake AI and app development into its national youth service curriculum is a reminder that the race to AGI is also a race to build human capital. By targeting hundreds of thousands of graduates passing through the NYSC each year, the programme is effectively turning basic AI literacy and software skills into a default expectation for upward mobility, not a niche specialism. That’s especially important in a labour market where formal jobs are scarce but mobile connectivity is widespread. ([allafrica.com](https://allafrica.com/stories/202512180341.html?utm_source=openai))

From a global perspective, initiatives like this help determine whether frontier AI ends up deepening global inequality or diffusing opportunities. If countries like Nigeria can produce large cohorts of AI‑literate graduates who understand how to use, fine‑tune and even build on top of foundation models, they’re better positioned to capture value in local languages and contexts rather than simply importing tools from US or Chinese labs. It won’t close the compute gap, but it can narrow the application gap. For AI companies, it also hints at where the next wave of power users and developers may come from, which should influence localisation, pricing and partnership strategies across the African continent.