By Adedapo Adesanya

The federal government has pledged to back local cloud hosting efforts and data infrastructure to allow Nigerian companies compete with foreign counterparts.

The Nigerian government made this pledged as MTN Nigeria launched its $150 million Tier III Dabengwa Data Centre in Lagos.

This new facility, which is West Africa’s largest modular data center, was unveiled on Tuesday in a high-profile ceremony, marking a significant step in the country’s digital evolution and showcasing the administration’s dedication to achieving full digital sovereignty.

Speaking at the commissioning, the Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Mr Bosun Tijani, said the new facility was a vital pillar in the government’s broader strategy to reduce Nigeria’s dependence on foreign hosting services, enhance digital resilience, and foster economic diversification.

“This initiative aligns directly with the vision of President Bola Tinubu to build a $1 trillion economy, an economy powered by productivity, innovation, enterprise, and inclusivity,” Mr Tijani said.

“With infrastructure like this, we are keeping our data and capital local, reducing the need to spend scarce foreign exchange. It provides the digital backbone for key sectors such as fintech, healthcare, education, and AI. This is how we build national trust and ensure digital sovereignty,” he added.

Mr Tijani also reaffirmed that the facility supports the government’s Project BRIDGE and the deployment of 7,000 communication towers in unserved and underserved areas, which together aim to provide meaningful connectivity to over 20 million Nigerians still offline.

He further praised MTN’s support for the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) programme, noting the company’s N3 billion commitment to training Nigerian youth in digital skills.

“Talent needs platforms. This facility provides exactly that enterprise-grade infrastructure on Nigerian soil that enables startups, developers, and creators to scale their innovations from Nigeria to the world,” the Minister said.

Also speaking, the Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Mr Kashifu Inua Abdullahi, described the development as more than a corporate milestone, calling it a national investment in data sovereignty and a foundation for Africa-focused innovation.

“This project signifies Nigeria’s readiness to build a robust, inclusive, and truly sovereign digital ecosystem in line with President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda,” Mr Abdullahi said.

“It directly supports the Nigeria Data Protection and Trust Policy, and positions the country to compete with global hyperscalers by enabling local cloud providers to thrive. With our 9-0-2 strategy, we at NITDA are working to expand inclusive access to digital infrastructure and create the right standards to accelerate cloud and AI adoption nationwide.”

He added that Nigeria is no longer waiting for foreign hyperscalers to invest in local capacity.

By Adedapo Adesanya

Nigerians are to expected to see improvement in telecommunication services as top forms have commenced network upgrades, following investments of up to $1 billion in equipment.

The equipment, received from Chinese manufacturers, is expected to boost quality offering and tackle service issues.

According to a report from The Punch, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) confirmed that equipment shipments have started arriving.

This is line with its deadline to mobile network operators working to make significant service improvements before the end of 2025.

“The ordered equipment have started arriving since early June, and deployment has already started in earnest by the Mobile Network Operators,” the newspaper quoted the NCC Executive Vice Chairman, Mr Aminu Maida.

“They are on course to meet the fourth quarter deadline for significant Quality of Experience enhancements,” he added.

A propped utilisation of the $1 billion will overturn underinvestment in infrastructure in recent years, a challenge that has plagued Nigerian telcos and consumers alike.

This comes following the approval of a long-awaited 50 per cent tariff increase by the industry regulator early this year.

The tariff review, the first in since 2013, was introduced to help operators cope with mounting operating costs, which has worsened due to inflation, energy prices, and foreign exchange constraints.

Mr Maida said it has received deployment strategies from all major operators and is closely monitoring progress.

“As the regulator, we collaborate closely with operators to streamline deployment plans and navigate complex dependencies. All operators have submitted their network improvement and deployment strategies, which we are rigorously monitoring,” he stated.

He also assured Nigerians that service improvements would become visible before the end of the year, even as he acknowledged the scale and complexity of the national upgrade effort.

“Nigerians can expect clear improvements in service quality by year-end, given the country’s vast size and complex network deployment challenges. Telcos are committed to their Q4 2025 network enhancement plans, backed by significant investments in cutting-edge technology to meet rising digital service demands,” the regulator noted.

“As the regulator, we are steadfast in holding them accountable for consistent progress,” the EVC assured.

By Adedapo Adesanya

Africa-centric voice technology platform, Intron, has announced its integration into several platforms, including legal services, patient care, and customer experiences across Africa.

The company, which has built a suite of best-in-class speech recognition and text-to-speech AI models specifically for African voices and accents, launched its clinical speech recognition platform in 2022 for hospitals and health ministries throughout Africa. Since then, Intron’s capabilities have expanded, offering advanced real-time voice AI solutions across key sectors, including financial services, telecommunications, legal and government agencies.

According to a statement, these solutions are already driving tangible impact and powering voice applications which outperforms giants like OpenAI, Azure, Google, and AWS at recognising African accents.

Earlier this year, the Ogun State Judiciary adopted Intron Sahara to alleviate the burdens of manual note-taking during court proceedings, allowing judges to focus entirely on the dialogue in the courtroom, enhancing attention, accuracy, and speed.

Testifying to this, the Office of the Chief Registrar, Ogun State High Court said, “Before now, we had to write down everything. It was exhausting and slow. Now, we can focus on what matters. What used to take 4+ hours now concludes in 2–3 hours. My Lord no longer has to write during proceedings. He now focuses entirely on what is being said, ensures everything is properly recorded, and we’re achieving much more in significantly less time than before,”

Sahara has significantly reduced session times, enabling more cases to be heard and expediting the delivery of justice. Focusing on speech AI, Sahara tackles these challenges directly with models trained on local data, accurately recognising heavily accented African names, currencies, numbers, decimals and technical terms where imported platforms fall short.

Also, Rwanda’s Ministry of Health tapped Intron to accelerate the nationwide rollout of its home-grown electronic medical records, using voice-driven documentation and automated translation to ease adoption for clinicians.

At EHA Clinics, a leading hospital with locations in Abuja, Kano, and Lagos, Nigeria, Sahara models cut clinical note times down to 57 seconds for a roughly 100-word report, improving the quality and detail of clinical notes in far less time.

C-Care, Uganda’s largest private hospital network, is also leveraging Sahara to cut patient wait times, reduce errors, and ease documentation across its 20+ hospitals and clinics. Intron also collaborates with several enterprises and organisations like Helium Health in Nigeria, the Rural and Urban Private Hospitals Association of Kenya (RUPHA), Rescue.co in Kenya, Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital in Northern Nigeria, and Elephant Healthcare– each driving meaningful and innovative AI applications across Africa.

Digital finance platform, Branch International, is collaborating with Intron to personalise after-hours outbound engagement, improving responsiveness and customer experience using Sahara CX Intelligence–advanced low-latency human-like conversational voice agents.

Sahara is built on a proprietary dataset of more than 3.5 million audio clips from over 18,000 speakers across 30+ countries, powered by Intron’s patented AccentMix algorithm and years of focused R&D. Intron’s speech-to-text models recognise over 300 distinct African accents and dialects, from Ghanaian English to Zulu-inflected speech. Its deep exposure to African speech patterns also enables stronger performance on North African and Arabic-English accents, surpassing expectations beyond its explicit training, outperforming several frontier voice AI models.

On the back of this breakthrough and most-recent warchest of over 30,000 hours of local language data in 64+ languages from over 32,000 speakers, Intron is training its next-generation Sahara-Titan model, a single advanced AI model that can understand, transcribe, and translate between 20 of Africa’s top languages like Swahili, Hausa, and Zulu.

Similarly, Sahara-Primus will be able to generate fluent, high-quality, and natural-sounding speech in 20 African languages–advanced models that are long overdue and in high demand, ushering in a new era of compelling user experiences across the continent.

Speaking further on this, Mr Tobi Olatunji, CEO of Intron, says, “Intron represents a future where no community is left behind by technology. Our recent industry-leading benchmarks show what’s possible when Africa builds for itself. Sahara is more than a technical breakthrough; it’s an ecosystem victory. Rather than rail against Big Tech model bias, why not build better models?”

“Intron was born in the busiest hospital wards, where background noise and scarce resources made accurate speech recognition a daily battle. We built for the hardest environment first, and now our technology scales effortlessly to courts, call centres and content creators. I’m proud of what our team has achieved – but we’re not alone. African AI is rising fast, built by local talent and data. Now is the moment to support, build and buy African so no community is left behind,” he added.

Following a $1.6 million pre-seed raise in 2024, Intron has accelerated R&D, bolstered both cloud-native and on-premises deployments, and continues to grow its Research, Engineering, and Growth teams. The company now serves over 40 organisations across 8 countries, the company continues to evolve from its roots in healthcare, becoming the voice-infrastructure layer of choice for startups and enterprises across Africa.