Nigeria’s Minister of Communication, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani, has launched N-ATLAS, an open-source language model capable of recognising and transcribing spoken words, as well as generating text in Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Nigerian-accented English.
The announcement was made over the weekend on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Developed in collaboration with Lagos-based startup Awarri, N-ATLAS is part of government efforts to promote responsible and inclusive AI and follows the project’s initial unveiling in April 2024.
The models are hosted on Hugging Face and are free to access for research, prototyping, and small-scale applications. Commercial use involving more than 1,000 end-users will, however, require a licence.
According to Awarri’s lead engineer, Sunday Afariogun, the release is primarily aimed at developers rather than end-users. The project is positioned as a foundational tool for building AI applications tailored to Nigeria’s linguistic and cultural contexts.
Developers have already begun experimenting. At Lena, a Lagos-based edtech firm, co-founder and CTO Bilesanmi Faruk is testing N-ATLAS for live translations in Yoruba and Nigerian-accented English. “It allows us to build offline learning tools that preserve cultural context while expanding access,” he said.
Other researchers share similar optimism. Natural language processing engineer Zainab Tairu said the open-source model would ease the burden of sourcing local datasets. “Having something like this makes it easier to build solutions with African voices and contexts at the core,” she noted.
The initiative comes as Nigeria seeks to establish itself in the global race for AI sovereignty. But challenges remain. Developers cite limited access to GPU computing power, reliance on foreign cloud providers, difficulties in acquiring quality datasets, and inadequate funding as barriers to scaling AI solutions locally.
Despite these constraints, stakeholders believe the release could spur sector-specific applications across education, agriculture, and healthcare. “Success will be when Nigerians use AI daily in their own languages without even thinking about it,” said Joshua Firima, co-founder of KrosAI.
N-ATLAS is also being viewed as a step toward cultural preservation. With over 2,000 languages spoken across Africa, fewer than 2% are represented in AI systems. “Without local models, many of these languages risk extinction,” said Awarri’s Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Aizehi Itua.
While symbolic, the initiative is expected to serve as a foundation for wider adoption if backed by further infrastructure, funding, and ecosystem collaboration.
