November 27-28, 2025: Nigeria’s Kwara AI Summit 2025 (Free)
by Piyush Mathur
Nigeria’s Kwara AI Summit 2025 is sneaking up on us fast—and nor is it any secret! With Kwara State’s governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq set to serve as its Chief Host, this huge event would unfold through November 27-28, 2025, and is meant to promote the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in that state and across Nigeria.
One can get a free General Pass or a Government Official Pass—both to the online and onsite versions of the event via this link:
https://www.kwara.ai/KwaraAISummit2025#/buyTickets/selectTickets
The event will commence at 9 AM on both days at the Ilorin Innovation Hub, located at 9a Ahmadu Bello Way, Government Reserved Area (GRA), Ilorin. One could take a bike from the Post Office toward the GRA; the venue is next to the Kwara Hotel.
These phone numbers might be useful: +234 916 000 9351; +234 807 861 2676; +234 810 578 2976
This is the contact form for the hub, just in case: https://iih.ng/contact
This is a partial screenshot of the banner for the Kwara AI Summit 2025, to be held in Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria, through November 27-28, 2025.
(Credit: Ilorin Innovation Hub)
The event is organised by the IIH, whose website tells us that its building began to be constructed in December 2020, with the entity getting registered as Ilorin Innovation Hub Ltd/Gte in July 2025. (In Nigeria, the classification ‘Limited by Guarantee’ is abbreviated as ‘Ltd/Gte’, while the term ‘Incorporated’ is used by entities registered as ‘Incorporated Trustees’—such as non-governmental organisations; meanwhile, entities ‘limited by shares’ use the abbreviation ‘Ltd’ as their title suffixes.)
The Kwara AI Summit 2025 is expected to focus on exploring how AI could be applied to ‘farming, education, and governance’—via a partnership between the government and the private sector. This is in line with Abdulrazaq’s projection of himself as pro-technology, pro-youth, futuristic, and pro-modernisation. The summit’s website notes that AbdulRazaq ‘is widely regarded as Nigeria’s first true AI Governor’.
Cursory observations
While free and open to the public, the event—going by its messaging on the website and the social media—appears top-down and with a fairly pre-determined objective. For example, the event’s stated agenda jumps straight to promoting AI application and government-‘private sector’ partnership; there is no mention of civic participation specifically or to a proactive consideration of ethical and environmental (and, for that matter, economic) concerns related to AI infrastructures.
It does not help there that the relevant sections of the IIH website are written in a somewhat sycophantic parlance when it comes to the governor.
It would be interesting to see whether, and to what effect, organisations like the Abuja-based Responsible AI Governance Initiative (RAI-GI) or the Ilorin-based FactCheckAfrica might play a role in this event if they happen to attend it and what follows from it. IIH’s website has not yet uploaded the list of its speakers, let alone the attendees generally.
Piyush Mathur, Ph.D., is the author of Technological Forms and Ecological Communication: A Theoretical Heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017).