This policy insight highlights the impact of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) on various sectors of the African economy and identifies some of the factors limiting the responsible adoption and growth of this technology in Africa. This brief further provides key policy considerations on how Africa can effectively employ the potential of generative AI to drive innovation, productivity, economic growth, and development in the continent. Through infrastructural development, capacity building and regional collaboration, Africa can harness generative AI's transformative power while ensuring its deployment is ethical, inclusive, and aligned with Africa’s unique challenges and goals.

The progress and advancement of any given nation is significantly dependent on its human capital, which is cultivated through the provision of high-quality basic education. This is established in the definition of education, which links it to the stock of skills, competencies, and other productivity-enhancing characteristics. Thus, the prioritisation of basic educational policies that tackle significant learning challenges is imperative for propelling human capital advancement in Nigeria.

Tobacco control policy refers to the efforts made to reduce the impact of tobacco use on public health. This can include measures such as increasing taxes on tobacco products, implementing smoke-free laws, running anti-smoking campaigns, and providing support for people who want to quit smoking. In Nigeria, the government played a critical role in the country's tobacco control efforts by ratifying the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which commits the government to take appropriate measures to reduce tobacco use and its associated health effects.

At the federal level, the government enforced tobacco control policies that apply to the entire country. The policies in this regard include higher taxes on tobacco products, Public smoking bans, regulations on tobacco advertising and sponsorship, and mandatory graphic health warnings on tobacco packages. Furthermore, the government allocated resources to support tobacco control programs and campaigns, monitor the impact of tobacco use and the effectiveness of tobacco control policies.

This brief highlights the importance of state involvement in tobacco control efforts. It seeks to provide evidence-based recommendations through the WHO MPOWER framework on how state governments can effectively implement tobacco control policies and programs that will protect their residents from the harmful effects of tobacco use.

A nation cannot develop in the face of endemic corruption. The fight against corruption cannot be won unless the rationale (how and why) for the act of corruption is understood and intensive strategies to block those channels are implemented. The fight against corruption in Nigeria has always been focused solely towards its cure (aftermath) while ignoring its prevention (the how and why), which has resulted in no discernable success over the years (Onyekwere et al., 2020).

In Nigeria, women’s labour participation has begun to pick up in recent years after many years of stagnation. However, women's entry point into labour has been mainly through the informal sector or at the bottom pyramid of the formal labour market. Promoting women's inclusion in the top echelon of the labour market remains a knotty policy issue. This has become more important with the Nigerian government increasing priority around MSMEs as a tool for poverty alleviation and economic development.