The World Bank urges Nigeria and other developing economies to accelerate AI adoption but warns that foreign-trained systems may produce inaccurate local results
World Bank Urges Nigeria to Embrace AI, Warns Foreign Data Could Mislead
The World Bank has urged Nigeria and other developing economies to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence, saying the technology could deliver significant economic and productivity gains.
The lender, however, warned that AI systems trained largely on foreign data could produce inaccurate or unsuitable results when deployed in countries such as Nigeria, where local conditions, languages and institutions differ.
The World Bank made the disclosure in its latest World Development Report, titled The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, which examined the opportunities and risks associated with the rapidly expanding technology.
According to the report, developing economies have more to gain and less to fear from AI than richer countries, with about one in six jobs expected to be enhanced by the technology rather than replaced.
The report also found that less than 10 per cent of jobs in developing economies are susceptible to AI automation, compared with more than 33 per cent in high-income economies.
Speaking on the cost of adopting AI at scale, Indermit Gill, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the World Bank Group, said developing countries did not need massive investments in data centres or large language models to benefit from the technology.
“AI can help solve important problems involving narrow tasks even when local computing power is limited, electricity is unreliable, and internet service is dodgy. Small AI models can be constructed to run offline on just about any hardware,” Gill said.
The World Bank stressed that AI must also be adapted to local languages, institutions and working environments to deliver meaningful results in developing economies.
According to the lender, “AI is unusually sensitive to context,” meaning a system that performs effectively in one country could fail when applied elsewhere without adequate localisation.
The report cited Nigeria as an example, noting that a medical AI system trained with data from wealthy countries recommended more laboratory tests than local conditions warranted.
“In Nigeria, a medical AI trained on data from wealthy countries recommended more laboratory tests than local conditions warranted.
“For most developing economies, the greatest opportunity lies in adapting AI to local needs,” the financial institution stated.
The World Bank also called on developing economies to reduce their dependence on technologies supplied by a single country, while clarifying that this does not mean pursuing “AI sovereignty by building every layer of an AI supply chain themselves”.
Instead, it recommended that countries source models, cloud services and other AI tools from multiple countries, ensuring interoperability and the ability to switch providers without rebuilding entire systems.
The report, which surveyed 777 firms in Nigeria, found that AI adoption has increased across developing economies in recent years.
Nigeria has also recorded progress in responsible AI development, ranking 38th out of 135 countries and first in Africa in the 2026 Global Index on Responsible AI released in July. The country scored 45.93 out of 100 for its development of frameworks, institutions and safeguards for responsible AI deployment.
The Nigerian firms surveyed by the World Bank had varying expectations about the impact of AI adoption on productivity. The report projected that rapid adoption could increase productivity by 21 per cent, while a slower adoption scenario could deliver a 2 per cent increase.
The World Bank also cited studies showing that AI-driven productivity gains at the task level could range from about 6 per cent to 88 per cent, with some of the largest gains recorded in coding-related work.
