National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR)

Organization Information

TypeGovernment

Founded2020

Sizelarge

Maturityestablished

Opennesspartial

LocationWuye District, Abuja, Nigeria

FundingGovernment-funded (NITDA/Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy). Also runs AI Fund in partnership with Google providing grants to Nigerian AI startups.

Websitehttps://ncair.nitda.gov.ng/

GitHub—

HuggingFaceNCAIR1

Contactncair@nitda.gov.ng

Coverage

CountriesNigeria

Languages

Yoruba Hausa Igboeng

Description

NCAIR is a special purpose vehicle of NITDA (National Information Technology Development Agency) created to promote research and development on emerging technologies. The centre focuses on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics and Drones, Internet of Things (IoT), and other emerging technologies aimed at transforming the Nigerian digital economy. NCAIR developed N-ATLAS, Nigeria's first open-source multilingual LLM supporting Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian English.

🦄 UNICEF Relevance

Critical government partner for NLP work in Nigeria. NCAIR has developed production-ready ASR models for Nigeria's three major languages (Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo) plus Nigerian English. N-ATLAS LLM could power chatbots and information services in local languages. As a government entity, they have mandate and resources for scaling. Direct alignment with UNICEF Nigeria's digital programmes.

Key People

Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi - Director General, NITDA
Oversees NCAIR as part of NITDA's digital innovation mandate

Projects

N-ATLAS: Nigeria's first open-source multilingual & multimodal LLM. Fine-tuned from Llama-3 8B with 400M+ tokens. Supports Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Nigerian English. Launched at UNGA80.
Yoruba Hausa Igboeng
Yoruba ASR: Automatic speech recognition model for Yoruba language.
Yoruba
Hausa ASR: Automatic speech recognition model for Hausa language.
Hausa
Igbo ASR: Automatic speech recognition model for Igbo language.
Igbo
Nigerian English ASR: ASR model optimized for Nigerian-accented English.
eng

Partnerships

NITDA (parent organization)
Awarri Technologies (N-ATLAS development partner)
Google (AI Fund partnership)
Data Science Nigeria

Notes

Government-backed with significant resources (134 staff). N-ATLAS launched at UN General Assembly 2024 signals political commitment. Models on HuggingFace are open-source. Focus on practical applications in agriculture, health, education. Could be strategic partner for scaling UNICEF language tech across Nigeria.