Nigeria is at risk of making the same mistake with artificial intelligence that it has made with many previous education reforms: embracing the language of innovation without fixing the conditions required for innovation to work.
That is why the co-creation workshop on Advancing Inclusive Education through Artificial Intelligence, convened by the Nigerian Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory (NAIRL), University of Lagos, in partnership with the Centre for Disability and Inclusion Africa (CDIA), deserves more than a passing mention.
Held on August 13, 2026, at NiTHub, University of Lagos, the workshop confronted a difficult reality. Artificial intelligence may transform education for learners with disabilities, but it can just as easily deepen existing inequalities if Nigeria gets the foundations wrong.
The promise is enormous. AI could help provide personalised learning, speech recognition, text-to-speech services, adaptive educational materials, translation, intelligent tutoring and other forms of assistive technology. For a learner who has historically been excluded because a classroom, textbook or digital platform was inaccessible, such tools could be revolutionary.
But there is a dangerous assumption that technology automatically produces inclusion. It does not.
An AI application cannot compensate for a school without electricity. A sophisticated digital learning platform is of little use to a child who has no reliable internet access. And the best assistive technology will achieve little if teachers have neither the training nor the resources to use it.
This is why one of the workshop’s most important decisions was to put collaboration before technology. The stakeholders reordered the priorities as: collaborate, strengthen policy, develop ethical and accessible AI, build teacher capacity, improve infrastructure, expand assistive technology, and then test, evaluate and scale.
That ordering is both logical and politically uncomfortable.
It tells government that Nigeria cannot simply purchase AI products and declare an education revolution. It must first create the conditions under which those technologies can actually serve learners.
More importantly, persons with disabilities must stop being treated as passive recipients of policy. They must have a seat at the table when technologies are conceived, designed, tested and evaluated. The workshop’s insistence that persons with disabilities should be “co-designers and co-owners” is not a matter of political correctness. It is a matter of effectiveness.
Who better to identify an inaccessible system than the person expected to use it?
The proposed AI and Inclusive Education Consortium, potentially operating as an “AI’s Ability Working Group”, could provide the institutional structure needed to turn these ideas into action. But Nigeria has seen too many committees, task forces and communiques disappear into administrative archives. This initiative must not become another one.
The consortium needs measurable targets, timelines, funding and public accountability. It should be able to answer simple questions: How many schools will be reached? How many teachers will be trained? Which AI solutions will be tested? How many learners with disabilities will benefit? What does the evidence show? What is working—and what is not?
There is also an urgent regulatory question. As AI enters classrooms, issues of privacy, data protection, algorithmic bias, accessibility and discrimination cannot be treated as afterthoughts. A system that excludes a blind learner, misinterprets a speech-impaired child or makes decisions based on biased data is not “intelligent” in any meaningful sense.
Government therefore needs to move faster than technology, not slower.
The proposed Teacher AI Literacy Programme is an especially sensible starting point. Teachers should not be expected to become software engineers, but they must understand what AI can do, where it fails, how to use it responsibly and how to ensure that technology serves rather than replaces professional judgement.
Ultimately, Nigeria should judge this initiative not by the sophistication of its AI demonstrations but by the experiences of actual learners.
If AI enables a child with a disability to read, communicate, participate, learn and compete on more equal terms, then it is serving its purpose. If it creates another expensive digital system that only a privileged minority can access, then Nigeria will simply have digitised exclusion.
The University of Lagos workshop has provided the blueprint. The real question now is whether government, educators, technology developers and society have the courage to implement it. Nigeria does not need another communique. It needs action and it needs to begin with the people whom inclusive education is supposed to include.