By Chinyere Anyanwu
The Lagos State Government Ministry of Establishment and Training, in partnership with J. Soji-George Consulting Nigeria Limited and the University of Kigali, Rwanda, has embarked on a two-day capacity building training for select civil servants in the state.
The training programme, which held in Lagos on Wednesday, October 7 and Thursday, October 8, was themed: “Executive Leadership Masterclass in AI, Governance and Economic Transformation (AI-GET).”
The training, according to the facilitators, was aimed at empowering the state’s workforce to make them AI-ready and enhancing their productivity.
Speaking on the sidelines of the programme, one of the resource persons, Prof. Victor Odumuyiwa, Professor of AI & Natural Language Processing, University of Lagos, pointed out that, “government is going the right direction of taking their workforce towards being AI-ready in this current dispensation, and this is very important because how do you regulate a technology you don’t know anything about? And how do you also optimise your productivity in this generation when you don’t know how to use the tools that are changing the way we do things? It’s impressive that government is doing this and trying to empower the workforce to make them AI-ready.”
Clarifying the issue of many workers losing their jobs to AI, Prof. Odumuyiwa explained that AI will only displace people who don’t know how to use it, adding that the participants were not afraid of losing their jobs to AI because they now understand how to use AI to improve on what they do.
On what the state government should expect from civil servants who have undergone the training, Prof. Odumuyiwa said, “it will increase productivity. Things they’ve been spending too much time to do before, things that have been monotonous, and things that have just been like repetitive tasks can now be automated with AI. So, they are going to be more efficient in their turnaround, and have more throughput than before.”
Also speaking, Prof. Ogechi Adeola, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research, Innovation, and Enterprise, University of Kigali, Rwanda, who was upbeat about the partnership between her institution and other collaborators, said, “the University of Kigali has been at the forefront of advancing AI in education and this presents an opportunity for us to advance knowledge in AI in Lagos State.”
She noted that the training focused on how to implement solutions, how AI can accelerate economic growth, and how AI can enable government officials to achieve set goals.
Speaking on the expected impact of the training on the participants as well as on the state, the Chief Executive Officer/Senior Partner, J. Soji-George Consulting Nigeria Limited, Prof. Olusoji George, said the training will afford the participants the opportunity of learning how to generate data and how to use AI responsibly.
In addition, he said, “we will do follow up. We are giving them a 90-day challenge, so that after the 90 days, we will come back to their ministries, and see what has been their productivity.
“Secondly, because most of them are assistant directors, we will see how far they have allowed this knowledge to trickle down. Because if they don’t allow it to trickle down, it will not achieve tangible result because after now they are supposed to go down and train other people. So we will not leave them as they go today.”
Dr. Luqman Afolabi, Dean of School of Economics, Finance and Accounting, University of Kigali, Rwanda, while speaking at the event, said the workshop primarily focused on economic transformation and AI application.
Dr. Afolabi explained that the training exposed participants to practical applicability of AI and AI software including Gemini Cloud and other AI chatbots that would enable them to “use proper prompts to get good responses without human AI detection.”
He said, “AI has come to stay. We have to accept that AI is part of us now. We cannot do without AI. AI will create more jobs. It won’t take our human jobs.
“What we are doing today is part of capacity building in ensuring that our civil servants are more productive. AI will save time, save cost and improve efficiency. It will improve quality of life and standard of living.”
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