Kuni Tyessi in Abuja
From AI classifiers for menstrual health to WhatsApp bots, school registries, flood alerts and digital safety tools, secondary school girls in the FCT are building Artificial Intelligence, AI, solutions for problems in their own communities.
The innovations were showcased at the AI for Her Showcase 2026 at Model Secondary School, Maitama, Abuja, yesterday, where technology initiative, AfroTechxcel, announced it has trained 772 girls from 16 government schools and submitted a child-centred AI education policy memorandum to the National Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA, and the FCT Secondary Education Board.
Founder and Executive Director of AfroTechxcel, Emerald Akhaumere, said the 772 girls completed 8,301 learning activities, made 1,138 quiz attempts, averaged 73 per cent against a 70 per cent progression benchmark, and developed over 700 projects that received more than 4,980 rounds of feedback from human mentors.
According to her, the girls are not doing class assignments, but building deployable solutions aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs, with financial projections and user-testing.
“Too often, we take curricula designed elsewhere, for children living in entirely different circumstances, and place them in Nigerian classrooms as though context is a detail. It is not a detail. It is fundamental. A girl in Mpape needs the tools to understand and solve the problems around her, not simply the problems somebody else has chosen for her,” she said.
A breakdown of the projects shows over one-third focused on digital innovation including AI classifiers, WhatsApp community bots and school registries, nearly 30 per cent addressed healthcare including menstrual and maternal health, almost one-fifth focused on safety, consent and digital rights, while others tackled climate resilience through flood alerts and agric tracking tools.
“This is my school. I sat in this compound, wore this uniform, and walked these corridors without knowing what I would become,” Akhaumere, an alumna of Model Secondary School, Maitama, said, noting that the programme is designed to give girls both human and technical skills.
“Everything I have built since has been an attempt to give other girls both,” she said, adding: “Digital skills are important, but they must meet the girls where they are, not where we think they are, in order to create impact.”
She said the policy memorandum submitted to NITDA and the FCT Board proposes responsible AI integration in schools anchored on teacher training, affordable access, learning quality and child protection.
“Teachers must be equipped to use AI to strengthen their teaching, not have their professional judgement replaced by a tool. We are not handing over a complaint. We are presenting a tested model, our own evidence, and a costed proposal to demonstrate what is possible in schools that already exist,” she said.
Akhaumere, who disclosed plans to establish learning hubs in Lugbe and Mpape, and create internship pathways into entrepreneurship, freelancing and advocacy, said: “A certificate alone does not change someone’s income.”
Also speaking, NITDA Director-General, Kashifu Inuwa, represented by Director of IT Infrastructure and Solutions, Oladejo Olawumi, said the girls are not spectators in Nigeria’s digital economy but part of the answer.
“You are not here as spectators to a conversation about the future of Nigeria’s digital economy. You are in the conversation. You are part of the answer,” he said.
He praised the girls for building offline-first solutions to address connectivity gaps in public schools.
“This is not a lesser kind of technology. That is the right kind. A solution designed for a Nigerian community by someone who lives in it will always understand the problem better than one adapted from somewhere else,” he said.
Olawumi said NITDA targets 70 per cent digital literacy by 2027 and 95 per cent by 2030, and called for collaboration between NITDA’s literacy programmes and AfroTechxcel’s school-based model, while urging the girls to explore NITDA’s iHatch incubation programme and the Nigeria Startup Act.
He however warned that innovation must be anchored on responsibility.
“Building technology carries responsibility. Whatever you create will touch other people, their data, their trust, sometimes their safety,” he said.