By Elizabeth Godwin
Four international technology firms – Lakeba Group (Australia), Next Digital (Nigeria), AqlanX (United Arab Emirates), and Agentic Dynamic (Netherlands) – have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to establish a new joint venture, AfricAI.
AfricAI is positioned as a landmark initiative to strengthen Africa’s digital sovereignty by localising, deploying, and commercialising enterprise-grade artificial intelligence solutions tailored to African markets.
According to a joint statement issued by the partners, the project will immediately focus on Nigeria as its flagship market, taking advantage of the country’s national data centres and edge infrastructure to roll out AI applications in healthcare, digital identity, document automation, public administration, and enterprise services.
The firms explained that the venture is not about outsourcing AI to Africa but about developing it “within Africa, by Africa, for Africa.” AfricAI aims to position the continent as an active developer of inclusive and context-aware AI systems built locally to address local realities.
To achieve this, the initiative will combine four pillars—global intellectual property, regional expertise, deployment capability, and next-generation agentic AI architecture. The partners plan to build a distributed and interoperable AI network across the continent, creating applications for agriculture, urban planning, education, and public services.
By 2026, AfricAI intends to expand operations into Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Rwanda, while training at least 100 AI professionals to strengthen regional talent. It will also establish a Centre of Excellence dedicated to AI development, cybersecurity, ethical deployment, and model tuning.
In its first phase, AfricAI will prioritise sovereign AI for digital identity and compliance, knowledge automation, document intelligence, multilingual health services, and AI-powered citizen engagement platforms. The joint venture also commits to ensuring AI workloads are hosted and processed locally, in line with Nigeria’s data residency laws.
Speaking on the launch, Chairman of Next Digital, Prince Malik Ado-Ibrahim, said AfricAI was about shaping technology to reflect “who we are as Nigerians and Africans.” He stressed that Nigeria would lead the movement to make Africa a force in the global AI conversation.
Lakeba Group CEO, Giuseppe Porcelli, described the initiative as a bold step toward building a sovereign AI ecosystem, while AqlanX founder, Demetrio Russo, highlighted the importance of localisation, multilingual compliance, and digital trust. Chairman of Agentic Dynamic, Eren Sivasli, added that scalable, domain-specific automation would be key to supporting human workflows.
