More than 400 exhibiting companies and startups, 150 speakers, and 200 investors managing a combined $200 billion: GITEX Nigeria 2026 posted numbers to match its ambitions. The event opened on August 31 in Abuja with a government summit on artificial intelligence, before continuing on September 2-3 in Lagos with a tech expo, a future-economy conference, and a startup festival.
The message from Nigerian officials was hammered home throughout the four days: Africa can no longer settle for importing its artificial intelligence. "We want to be an active builder of technology," said Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, director-general of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), at the Abuja summit. The event ran under the patronage of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, with the participation of Secretary to the Government of the Federation George Akume and Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu.
The figures presented in Lagos explain the urgency felt in Abuja. Africa's digital payments market is projected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2030, while the share of Nigerians holding a bank account rose from 45.3% in 2021 to 63.3% in 2024. That bank-account growth has been driven by digital platforms, yet most of the underlying infrastructure — cloud, data centers, AI models — is still hosted or designed outside the continent.
To reverse that dependency, Nigeria is betting on training its own technical workforce. The "3 Million Technical Talent" initiative already claims 1.87 million registered participants and more than 135,000 people trained across three successive cohorts, with the stated goal of building a local pool of engineers and AI specialists rather than continuing to recruit abroad.
The presence in Lagos of Wamkele Mene, Secretary-General of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), and Abisoye Coker-Odusote, director-general of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), broadened the debate beyond Nigeria's borders. Organizers framed the stakes around four pillars — data, cloud, operations, and artificial intelligence — which they present as the conditions for an interoperable African digital infrastructure, rather than a patchwork of national systems isolated from one another.
In Central Africa, this effort is only just beginning. Cameroon announced in early September that Cybastion would invest $75 million in an AI-dedicated data center in Douala — a far more modest undertaking than what was on display in Lagos, but one built on the same logic: bringing back onto the continent part of the infrastructure its digital economy already depends on.
Lagos's Startup Festival, for its part, drew applications from more than 25 countries, a sign, organizers say, that the debate over technological sovereignty is already spreading beyond Nigeria's borders. Most African states, meanwhile, have yet to legislate on data localization or AI governance the way Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa have begun to.
