In this study, we develop Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Transformer-based transfer learning models for English-to-Igbo translation - a low-resource African language spoken by over 40 million people across Nigeria and West Africa. Our models are trained on a curated and benchmarked dataset compiled from Bible corpora, local news, Wikipedia articles, and Common Crawl, all verified by native language experts. We leverage Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architectures, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), enhanced with attention mechanisms to improve translation accuracy. To further enhance performance, we apply transfer learning using MarianNMT pre-trained models within the SimpleTransformers framework. Our RNN-based system achieves competitive results, closely matching existing English-Igbo benchmarks. With transfer learning, we observe a performance gain of +4.83 BLEU points, reaching an estimated translation accuracy of 70%. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining RNNs with transfer learning to address the performance gap in low-resource language translation tasks.

The Nigerian government has approved the establishment of a new agency for robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) as the country begins work on a strategic policy blueprint to commit more resources to research in science and technology. Minister of Science and Technology, Dr Ogbonnaya, announced over the weekend, at a political rally of the All Progressives Congress in Abakaliki, capital of Ebonyi state that the agency has been given the official nod by President Muhammadu Buhari. The new agency to be set up in the south east of Nigeria, probably in Abakaliki or Enugu, according to insiders in the ministry of Science and Technology, would leverage collaborations with international research bodies on robotics and AI. It will enabled research and teachings in more complex technology skills to thousands of young people. "The ultimate goal is to have an agency mandated solely on advancing our knowledge and usability of robots and AI across sectors in Nigeria. The idea is to leapfrog our growth" said a source at the presidency.

Minister of Science and Technology, Ogbonnaya Onu said President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the establishment of an agency on robotics and artificial intelligence, AI, for the South East. Mr Onu revealed this at a grand rally of the All Progressives Congress in Abakaliki, capital of Ebonyi state. The rally which received defectors from the Peoples Democratic Party, was attended by the national chairman of the party, Adams Oshiomhole. Some of the defectors who were received include, Sonni Ogbuoji, former Minister of Power and Steel, Goddy Ogbaga, former Secretary to the State Government, Bernard Odoh and former attorney general and commissioner for justice, Augustine Nwankwegu. Mr Onu told the rally that in 2015 he pleaded with South-East not to put its eggs in one basket but his pleadings fell on deaf ears.