Locals Technology Empowerment Centre

Call Directions Website Contact the organization

Locals Technology Empowerment Centre Empowering Communities. Access to technology is access to opportunity.

Connecting Futures | L-TEC is a volunteer-led non-profit organisation empowering underserved communities through digital literacy & emerging technology training.

The Gender Digital Divide in Northern Nigeria - What the Numbers SayIn Northern Nigeria, a man is five times more likely...
14/09/2026

The Gender Digital Divide in Northern Nigeria - What the Numbers Say

In Northern Nigeria, a man is five times more likely than a woman to use a computer.

That is not an opinion.
That is a World Bank measurement.

According to the World Bank's 2025 Digital Skills in Nigeria Report, based on MICS household survey data:

📊 In the northeast and northwest regions of Nigeria, over the past three months, only 1.5% of women used a computer, compared to 7% of men.

📊 Only 0.5% of women in these regions created an electronic presentation, compared to 2% of men.

📊 61% of fathers in Northern Nigeria discourage their daughters from using the internet.

📊 55% of men in Northern Nigeria discourage their wives from using the internet.

📊 In Jigawa State specifically, only 2.5% of households have a computer at home, one of the lowest rates in Nigeria.

These numbers do not describe a technology problem.
They describe a social, cultural, and economic problem that technology is making more consequential with every passing year.

When digital skills determine access to jobs, financial services, government programmes, and educational opportunities, a gender digital divide becomes a gender economic divide. And then a gender opportunity divide. And then a generational one, passed to daughters who also grow up without access.

What changes this:

The evidence is clear. When women and girls are given structured access to digital tools, in a safe, supported environment, with instruction in a language they are comfortable in, by facilitators who understand their context, they close the gap rapidly.

That is why L-TEC designs its digital literacy programmes with gender access explicitly in mind. Not as an afterthought. As a design requirement.

Digital empowerment that does not reach women is not empowerment. It is a different kind of exclusion.

Source: World Bank Digital Skills in Nigeria Report 2025

L-TEC - Locals Technology Empowerment Centre

Data is the raw material of Artificial Intelligence. But data alone is never enough.AI also needs context to give inform...
14/09/2026

Data is the raw material of Artificial Intelligence. But data alone is never enough.

AI also needs context to give information meaning, knowledge to reason over it, and human understanding to keep it honest. Because knowledge can be incomplete, data can be biased, and AI outputs can be wrong, confidently and convincingly. That is why human oversight, ethical governance, and critical thinking are not optional in any AI system. They are the difference between AI that serves people and AI that misleads them.

This is where AI literacy becomes essential.

We can invest billions in infrastructure, computing, and datasets. But without people who understand what AI can do and what it cannot, who can question its outputs, recognise bias, and use it responsibly, those investments will never reach their full potential. Infrastructure without understanding is a tool without a hand to hold it.

AI readiness is not only about building AI.
It is about building people who understand AI.

At L-TEC, that is our work. The AI future must be technologically advanced and understood, accessible, and responsibly used by the communities it is meant to serve.

Empowering Communities. Connecting Futures.
L-TEC Locals Technology Empowerment Centre

The most powerful classroom in the world is in your pocket, and most of it is free.Every skill the digital economy is pa...
31/08/2026

The most powerful classroom in the world is in your pocket, and most of it is free.

Every skill the digital economy is paying for right now from coding, design, content creation, data analysis, AI, to digital marketing and cybersecurity has already been taught by someone, recorded, and made available online. YouTube. Coursera. Google Digital Skills for Africa. Government Digital Skills Programme, among others.

A young person in his community with a ₦200 data subscription has, in theory, access to the same knowledge as a student at a university. The gap between wanting to learn something and being able to learn it has never been smaller in human history.

But here is what L-TEC has learned from working in communities: the barrier is rarely the internet. It is awareness. Most people do not know these resources exist, and nobody has shown them where to start. Digital literacy is knowing that the knowledge is there, knowing how to find it, and having the confidence to reach for it.

That is the work we do. One community at a time.

L-TEC - Locals Technology Empowerment Centre
Empowering Communities. Connecting Futures.

Infrastructure is only the beginning.Kano State has awarded approximately ₦27.8 billion in contracts for ICT and CBT cen...
31/08/2026

Infrastructure is only the beginning.

Kano State has awarded approximately ₦27.8 billion in contracts for ICT and CBT centres across all 44 LGAs, with 300 computers planned for each centre, alongside internet infrastructure and multiple power sources.

This is more than an investment in buildings and computers. It is an opportunity to bring digital learning, examinations, skills development and technology closer to communities.

But the impact will not be measured by the number of computers installed.

It will be measured by the number of people who gain skills, access opportunities, create solutions and participate meaningfully in the digital economy.

L-TEC welcomes this direction and calls for equal attention to training, inclusion, maintenance, accessibility, community utilisation and accountability.

Build the infrastructure.
Equip the people.
Sustain the opportunity.

Every LGA. Every community. Every learner.

No community should be left behind.

L-TEC: Empowering Communities. Connecting Futures.

🌍 WORLD HAUSA LANGUAGE DAY - 26 AUGUST 2026 | ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━Hausa is more than a language.It is a langu...
26/08/2026

🌍 WORLD HAUSA LANGUAGE DAY - 26 AUGUST 2026
|

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Hausa is more than a language.

It is a language of history, scholarship, trade and culture, connecting communities across West Africa and beyond for centuries. It is spoken by hundreds of millions of people across Nigeria, Niger, Ghana, Cameroon, Chad, Sudan and the global diaspora. For generations, Hausa scholars and communities have used Ajami script to write, preserve and transmit knowledge long before the digital age arrived.

Hausa does not need technology to validate its worth.
But technology needs Hausa, if it is ever to be truly inclusive.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The Challenge We Cannot Ignore

As Artificial Intelligence increasingly shapes education, communication and access to information, one question becomes more urgent with every passing year:

Can today's technology understand Hausa as well as it understands languages with greater digital representation?

The honest answer, in 2026, is: not yet.

In Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing (NLP), Hausa is still classified as a "low-resource language", meaning it has relatively limited datasets, digital tools and language technologies compared to its true scale and significance. This gap has real consequences:

🔴 Machine Translation: the quality of translation between Hausa and other languages remains inconsistent and unreliable.
🔴 Voice Technology: systems frequently struggle to accurately hear, interpret and respond to spoken Hausa.
🔴 AI & NLP: AI systems understand Hausa text and meaning far less effectively than they understand English, French or Arabic.
🔴 Digital Education: millions of Hausa speakers lack access to learning resources in a language their minds work fastest in.
🔴 Digital Inclusion: language is becoming a barrier where it should be a bridge, quietly excluding millions of citizens from full participation in the digital economy.

This is not simply a technology problem.

It is an education problem.
A research problem.
A policy problem.
Above all, an equity problem.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
On this World Hausa Language Day, L-TEC calls for action.

🏛️ TO GOVERNMENTS
Invest in Hausa digital infrastructure, datasets, language research and AI development. Embed Hausa meaningfully in national digital literacy programmes and digital economy policies. A language present in culture but absent from policy is a language at risk.

🎓 TO RESEARCHERS & UNIVERSITIES
Strengthen research in Hausa NLP, computational linguistics, speech technology and AI. Build open datasets. Publish in Hausa. The resources created today become the foundation upon which tomorrow's technologies will be built, or will not.

💻 TO DEVELOPERS & TECHNOLOGISTS
Build in Hausa. Design applications, educational platforms, voice interfaces, translation tools and AI solutions with Hausa-speaking communities in mind, not as an afterthought, but from the very first line of code.

👩‍🏫 TO TEACHERS & PARENTS
Help children understand AI, digital tools and technology through familiar language and local examples. A child should not find technology foreign simply because it does not speak the language they think in.

👥 TO CITIZENS & COMMUNITIES
Use Hausa online. Write it. Record it. Create quality digital content in it. Every word you publish in Hausa is data. Every recording is a resource. Every post is a contribution to the digital future of our language.

Using Hausa online is not only cultural preservation.
It is an act of digital participation.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Hausa has shaped scholarship, trade and culture across West Africa for centuries.

Now we must ensure it has a strong and rightful place in:

AI. Digital Education. Research. Innovation. The Digital Economy.

We should not simply wait for technology to understand us.
We should help build the technology that does.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The Hausa language is our heritage. It must also be our digital future.

🌍 Happy World Hausa Language Day - Barka da Ranar Hausa!

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

L-TEC - Locals Technology Empowerment Centre
Empowering Communities. Connecting Futures.

This is good news, and Jigawa citizens deserve to know it.The Jigawa State Information Technology and Digital Economy Ag...
26/08/2026

This is good news, and Jigawa citizens deserve to know it.

The Jigawa State Information Technology and Digital Economy Agency (JISITDEA) has opened a public tender for the installation of solar-powered electricity systems at 26 Computer Learning Centres across the state.

If successfully implemented, this could help keep these centres operational and create better opportunities for young people to access ICT training, particularly in communities where reliable electricity remains a challenge.

The bidding process involved the Due Process and Project Monitoring Bureau, representatives of government Ministries, Departments and Agencies, civil society organisations, and participating companies.

Solar power in ICT centres means one important thing: when the grid goes off, digital learning does not necessarily have to stop.

This is the kind of infrastructure investment that can support digital inclusion and skills development across Jigawa.

L-TEC welcomes this development and will continue to encourage public investment that expands access to digital infrastructure and skills for our communities. 👏



18/08/2026

For a community to fully benefit from the Internet, locals need to have the skills to build, operate, and maintain their network.

07/08/2026

Najeeb G. Abdulhamid

Address

Hadejia

Telephone

+2348060194770

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Locals Technology Empowerment Centre posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Organization

Send a message to Locals Technology Empowerment Centre:

Shortcuts

Share

Category