Bringing Investigative Science Back To Nigeria With Applied AI

Modernization is happening across the African continent.

“Africa is playing a central role in the global AI supply chain, particularly in the early production phase,” writes Rachel Adams at the African Policy Research Institute. “Countries, including Egypt, Rwanda and Mauritius, have published comprehensive AI strategies … Africa is already playing a central role in developing AI systems that require the use and availability of natural resources, labor and skills from across the region.”

So we see that from analysts, but we can also get examples of this from MIT students coming from African nations, who are interested in building up tech in their own communities. We have many African nations represented in the MIT student body, doing interesting things on the vanguard of LLM and neural net technologies.

The Role of Applied Research

Victory Yinka-Banjo came to MIT from Nigeria, where virtually none of the vaccines used within that country are produced domestically. She explained that in Africa, less than one percent of all vaccines are domestically made on the continent, and the African Union has set a goal for 60% of African vaccines being produced in Africa by 2040.

In order to do this, she suggested, the continent will need more focus on biotech.

She talked her arrival at the U.S. school, about wanting to hit the ground running with applied lab work at MIT, work on things like CRISPR.

MORE FOR YOU

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Clues And Answers For Sunday, May 18

Preakness 2025 Results: Journalism Wins, Gosger Places, Sandman Shows

Stars To Honor Linda Ronstadt At Country Music Hall Of Fame Concert

“I learned to see the bigger picture of my research,” she said. “By joining the MIT biotech group, I came to understand that my work in CRISPR was more than just about (basic genetics). It was laying the foundation for innovations like gene therapies that changed people's lives, and it was this understanding that really afforded me a switch in perspective, so that when I see the COVID RNA vaccine, it's really important to me that I understand how it works, that I understand the science, because maybe then I can apply that science in the context of a new disease.”

Showing a visual of Boston’s Kendall Square, she said this is the type of setup that’s needed within Nigeria. She described the community’s evolution this way:

“We're surrounded by biotech companies. But before a lot of these biotech companies came to be, there were postdocs and students and professors that saw that there was a gap between science and healthcare, and so decided to birth ventures that could link their early-stage academic discoveries to the large-scale production of solutions to diseases, connecting the dots in this biopharmaceutical R&D pipeline, and ultimately building an independent biotechnology industry.”

Connecting the Dots

“Could we recreate something like Kendall Square in Nigeria?” she asked. “What would it look like to take the essence of this ecosystem and build something on our own terms in Nigeria, something that is built by the growth of like-minded students and professors coming together to scale innovation to production?”

The first stage, she suggested, is discovery-based academic research.

Challenges she enumerated include lack of mentorship, lack of funding, mandated industrial training, limited opportunities, and poor compensation.

As an example of forward movement, Yinka-Banjo cited the University of Lagos AI and Robotics Lab founded in 2018, where she said her mother works.

“Working in this lab and trying to drive it forward had me constantly thinking about how spaces like this can be replicated on an even grander scale, for university students to engage in interdisciplinary research in the Life Sciences and Biotechnology,” she said, suggesting that a Nigerian diaspora, and non-Nigerian allies, can work to bring ideas from around the world back to the country, to innovate. She also talked about a school called ACEGID

“(ACEGID) is really at the forefront of our biotech industry, having been the first place that the Coronavirus was sequenced in Africa,” she said. “And while most of their opportunities are only open to graduate students, their model really stands out to me for their embracing of this idea of ‘by Nigerians for Nigeria’ while still leveraging partnerships with African and international researchers abroad.”

Schools and Communities

Leaving MIT to pursue a PhD, Yinka-Banjo envisions future growth of a movement in her country toward this kind of collaboration.

“We need … institutions to cater to the needs of the industrial training of Live Science students across universities in Nigeria,” she said. “So imagine what could happen if we had a network of interdisciplinary research hubs, where students are trained to be researchers that are locally grounded, globally connected and translational science minded, without having to pay for it, something that is accessible to undergraduate students.”

Again, she mentioned the idea of a Kendall Square in Nigeria – and our Kendall Square community certainly is a model, in my opinion, of how these things can work.

Notwithstanding systemic challenges, Yinka-Banjo imagined how this kind of change could roll across Africa, and other parts of the world.

The points made here are emblematic of how we move into the rest of the 21^st century. AI is not going away – it’s going to continue to be fundamental to national progress, in GDP, and in other ways, too.