Global Integrated Education Volunteers Association (GIEVA)
Global Integrated Education Volunteers Association (GIEVA) is training and upskilling women entrepreneurs in Northern Nigeria on the use of generative AI capabilities to create digital livelihoods.
Submitted by:
Global Integrated Education Volunteers Association (GIEVA)
Location:
Nigeria
Partners:
University of Jos, Nigeria
Zeustek ICT and Solutions
ICT hub in Jos Plateau
CoLab
About the Solution
Although many entrepreneurs use digital channels to drive business, approximately 75% of Small and Medium Enterprises in Nigeria have never used social media to promote sales. Compounded by the challenges of getting online and connecting through mobile devices, many entrepreneurs in Nigeria—and particularly women-led businesses—have never used generative AI and are not aware of the potential benefits of using these skills to expand their businesses.
GIEVA is bringing women entrepreneurs into the digital economy by training and upskilling women-led business owners on the use of generative AI capabilities to create digital livelihoods. Through a consortium of local partners, GIEVA built an AI-based platform for these women-led businesses in Northern Nigeria to increase sales by providing tailored sales advice and creating compelling online product profiles and digital sales assets optimized for sharing over WhatsApp and mobile phones. Their generative AI skilling interventions address the specific and nuanced challenges often faced by women entrepreneurs: limited education, informal economic engagement, cultural norm restrictions, digital exclusion, and gender-specific challenges.
Leading with Localism
GIEVA has designed generative AI skilling to address infrastructural gaps in Nigeria and adapted to local conditions such as limited access to electricity and internet connectivity, lack of computer access and digital skills, and limited fluency in English – the dominant online language used in large language models. GIEVA’s multi-disciplinary team has an extensive track record of working with historically excluded communities, government stakeholders, academic leaders, social impact organizations, and innovation partners across Nigeria to deliver tailored, culturally relevant, and locally led solutions. The organization made a deliberate, concerted effort to recruit women AI trainers, pairing male research assistants with female ones to increase comfort and build trust with a skeptical audience.
Skilling That Scales:
Generative AI Skills Challenge Impact Report
GIEVA trained 1,043 women from low-income and historically marginalized communities in Northern Nigeria, breaking social, religious, and cultural barriers. Preliminary post training surveys indicate that 85% of the users reported an improvement in business visibility and a 60% increase in sales after using the platform for a few weeks.
Highlights
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1
AI in Action: Used AI tools like ChatGPT to generate project materials, training plans, and curriculum, making the training accessible to women with lower literacy levels. Also used generative AI to analyze data and prepare presentations, contributing to the project’s sustainability.
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2
Developed and deployed generative AI prototype tailored to the local Hausa language of Northern Nigeria and launched a successful awareness campaign on generative AI, leading to significant interest and participation.
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3
One trainee’s engagement led to national-level interest and collaboration with the presidency on AI strategy.
What’s Next?
To create collaborative communities that enhance, expand, upscale, and sustain access through partnership, training, and mentoring; to establish an audio corpus (a database of speech audio files and text transcriptions) and maintain contextual local data-sets to enrich the low resource languages; and to incorporate into our AI solution (Jumm.ai) assistive technology for the benefit of persons with disabilities.
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