👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Google’s AI brain is coming to Nigeria

Happy new month!

Amid the end-of-year rush happening at your various workplaces, you took the time to open TC Daily this morning.

Here’s a big shout-out to you.

The newsroom has got a ton of projects in the pipeline. As a dedicated reader, you’d get first dibs on all the amazing stuff we’re working on this month!

For today, let’s jump in.

Google, through its philanthropic arm Google.org, is committing ₦3 billion ($2.1 million) to five Nigerian organisations to strengthen AI skills, drive innovation, and improve digital safety over the next three years. The investment moves Google’s skilling strategy directly into Nigeria’s higher-education system, targeting lecturers and teaching assistants, the people who shape what students learn.

Where’s the money going? The funding will be spread across five non-governmental organisations:

• FATE Foundation, in collaboration with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS)
• The African Technology Forum (ATF)
• Junior Achievement (JA) Africa 
• CyberSafe Foundation 

How it will work: Google plans to reform tertiary institutions’ curriculum first. FATE Foundation and AIMS will work with University College London to adapt the Google DeepMind AI curriculum for Nigerian universities and polytechnics, replacing outdated content with advanced modules. 

Once the curriculum is finalised, lecturers and teaching assistants will participate in a train-the-trainer programme led by AIMS, which will include deep technical training and a required research project aligned with their institution’s needs. Selected universities will receive support to integrate the new modules, upgrade teaching capacity, and deliver the training to students over the following three years.

What to expect: The investment is designed to shift Nigerian AI education from surface-level awareness to a deeper institutional capability. If the implementation holds, we could actually see a coordinated pipeline that links curriculum reform, lecturer training, and student exposure into early-stage product development, rather than the scattered short training cycles that are common today.

At the 60th Bankers’ Dinner organised by the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria (CIBN) on November 28, Olayemi Cardoso, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), said 27 banks have accessed the market to raise capital to meet fresh recapitalisation rules set by the CBN in March 2024.

Cardoso said affected banks have now raised fresh capital through public offerings and rights issues, with about 16 already meeting the new thresholds—that’s roughly a 60% success rate—among the 36 banks subject to the recapitalisation drive.

Catch up: In March 2024, the CBN introduced new minimum capital thresholds across the banking sector. Commercial banks with international, national, and regional licences must raise ₦500 billion ($347 million), ₦200 billion ($139 million), and ₦50 billion ($35 million), respectively. Merchant banks with national licences are required to raise ₦50 billion ($35 million), while non-interest banks with national and regional authorisations must meet ₦20 billion ($14 million) and ₦10 billion ($7 million) targets.

With only four months to the March 2026 deadline, more banks are inching toward compliance, suggesting we could see fewer mergers and acquisitions (M&As) than we initially anticipated; so far, only Providus Bank and Unity look sealed. The Nigerian Exchange (NGX) has played a pivotal role in helping banks raise capital, even as about ₦6.5 trillion ($4.5 billion) was wiped off the bourse in November, dragging market valuation to ₦91.28 trillion ($63.3 billion) and signalling low investor confidence.

Yet banks have used the NGX effectively for fundraising since 2024. Tech startups and analysts who are rightly worried about the exchange’s low liquidity might want to study how they pulled this off. Perhaps the takeaway here is, if banks can raise billions in this market, is there a tactic that startups considering an IPO should be paying closer attention to?

Like South Africa, cybersecurity breaches are becoming a dime a dozen in Kenya, and worse, companies (and people) are losing big money to attacks. According to a report by Serianu, a Kenyan cybersecurity firm, the country lost KES 29.9 billion ($231 million) to cybercrimes. Across the continent, that figure crossed $95 billion. The assessment, based on data from 280 organisations, says these attacks are becoming more coordinated.

What’s driving this surge? Payment fraud remains the top incident category, fuelled by weak monitoring tools and highly persuasive social engineering tactics. Online and email fraud alone made up 40% of incidents and 32% of losses, as the report noted that threat actors are now blending phishing, credential theft, and ransomware in AI-enabled campaigns to target public institutions. That tracks with the recent Microsoft 2025 Digital Defence Report, showing that people were 4.5 times more likely to click on a phishing email when it was written by an AI than when it was composed by a human.

The November wake-up call. Weeks before the report dropped, local media publications reported that in November, a coordinated attack disrupted access to several Kenyan government websites, including education, labour, health, energy, and water. The hackers replaced ministry websites with white supremacist messages like “We will rise again,” “White power worldwide,” and “14:88 Heil Hitler.” No group has claimed responsibility, but the websites have since been returned online.

What’s the government doing? The cabinet says a National Security Operations Centre (SOC) is being set up to centralise monitoring and incident response across ministries. Yet previous breaches show the implementation gap remains wide. Without stronger identity governance, visibility, and AI-driven security, the country risks digitally expanding faster than it can defend.

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The World Wide Web3

Source:

Coin Name	Current Value	Day	Month
Bitcoin	$91,444	+ 0.19%	– 18.89%
Ether	$3,017	– 0.77%	– 24.88%
XRP	$2.19	– 0.91%	– 16.32%
BNB	$894	– 0.15%	– 19.40%

* Data as of 06.45 AM WAT, December 1, 2025.

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