What's already shifted. The National AI Strategy was published in August 2024. The Data Protection Act has been law since July 2023. 3MTT has put 360,000+ Nigerians into technical training across all 774 LGAs, on the way to three million. Awarri's government-backed LLM speaks Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Pidgin and Ibibio. OPay clears nine million transactions a day. The infrastructure is being poured — fast.

What that means for civic leaders. Welfare decisions, credit scores, classroom assessments, healthcare triage, voter information, identity systems — increasingly mediated by models and platforms whose defaults nobody in your community signed off on. Inclusion isn't a value statement anymore; it's a design choice someone is making whether you're at the table or not.

Why this summit, this room. Civic actors, social-impact founders, educators, community organisers, public servants — the people Nigerians already trust — getting fluent enough in AI and digital systems to lead them, challenge them, procure them, regulate them, and build with them. Not to become engineers. To stop being end-users of decisions made elsewhere.

What leaves the room. Named commitments. Working partnerships across civic, tech, policy and capital. A 12-month follow-through plan owned by YALI Network Nigeria. Not a tote bag of slides.