AI Safety Nigeria

AI Safety Nigeria (AISN) is Nigeria's only civil society organisation dedicated exclusively to AI safety, governance, and AI literacy, headquartered in Abuja. Founded in August 2025 by Dr. Ayuba Tuodolo, a cybersecurity professional and technology-governance advocate with more than fifteen years of practice, AISN is committed to promoting responsible, safe, and ethical development of artificial intelligence in Nigeria and across Africa — building local expertise, influencing policy, raising public awareness, and embedding longtermist thinking while working to prevent catastrophic risks from advanced AI. The Organisation operates at national scope from its Garki, Abuja base, making it an Organisation under the corpus's 2026-06-10 local-group-vs-organisation statute.

Founding and leadership

Dr. Tuodolo's background spans human physiology, pharmacology, information technology, and cybersecurity governance, and he has positioned AISN as a bridge between the global AI safety research field and Nigeria's emerging digital governance ecosystem. He convened Nigeria's first AI Safety Summit and the African Cybersecurity Convention, and serves on the Advisory Council of the Blacks in AI Safety and Ethics (BASE) network in the United States.

The organisation's board chair is Dr. Chinasa T. Okolo, a Cornell-trained AI researcher and former Brookings Institution Fellow named to the TIME 100 most influential people in AI in 2024, selected as a 2026 World Bank Africa Fellow, and a contributor to both the African Union's Continental AI Strategy and Nigeria's National AI Strategy. Okolo's convening role with AISN links the organisation to the continental AI governance networks she has helped build. The team includes a co-executive director for operations (Tandokazi Xozwa), project community leads, a communications and stakeholder engagement lead, and legal and technical advisors, forming a small professional staff structure appropriate to AISN's founding phase.

Programs

AISN operates three core program pillars.

The AI Safety & Governance Fellowship is the organisation's flagship capacity-building initiative, designed to develop Nigerian and African professionals in AI safety and governance. The programme is intended to build Africa's capacity to govern its own AI future, producing a cadre of local practitioners who can contribute to policy, research, and institutional design in the region.

The Learn & Launch Series is a monthly public-education programme running in-person sessions in Abuja on AI safety topics. Sessions are purposefully interactive and open to policymakers, regulators, academics, engineers, and development professionals, with topics grounded in the African policy context. A July 2026 session titled "Metrics and Manipulation: Preventing Reward Hacking in Fragile Economies" was held at the American Corner, FCT Public Library, Abuja, illustrating the programme's focus on making frontier AI safety concerns legible in resource-constrained and governance-fragile settings. Live reading groups accompany the series as a parallel community engagement mechanism.

The AI Safety Research pillar focuses on alignment, robustness, and safety protocols tailored for the African context, with the aim of building research capacity directly relevant to Nigeria's development conditions rather than importing wholesale from the global-North AI safety research mainstream.

Policy engagement

AISN has established a research partnership with the Digital Policy Alert, a global AI-policy monitoring platform, co-authoring a comprehensive analysis of Nigeria's AI governance landscape. The report, authored by Tuodolo with Motiloluwa Oriowo, Rachael Ogochukwu, and DPA colleagues, documents Nigeria's strategy-led, incremental model — centred on the National AI Strategy 2025–2029 published by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy — and maps pending legislative proposals, the applicability of the Data Protection Act 2023 to AI systems, and Nigeria's participation in African Union initiatives and bilateral partnerships. This collaboration positions AISN as a named civil-society actor in the documentation and analysis of Nigeria's AI governance trajectory.

Place in the movement

AISN is the corpus's first West African civil society organisation dedicated exclusively to AI safety, filling a significant geographic gap in a continent where most documented AI-good work had been concentrated in East Africa (Kenya in particular). Its founding and rapid programme build-out — from launch in August 2025 to a named research partnership, active public fellowship, and monthly education series within a year — reflects a broader pattern of AI safety civil-society capacity emerging in the Global South alongside, and in dialogue with, global AI governance cycles. Major funders include Google.org and Digital Policy Alert, grounding the organisation's early-phase sustainability in both tech-philanthropy and policy-research ecosystems. AISN's 2026 African Excellence Award (MEA Markets) is an early external validation of its standing in the African tech and governance landscape.