The future must carry their fingerprints: from digital access to digital agency
Keynote Address delivered by Professor Seun Kolade at the 2026 Byte Busters Annual Showcase
Friday, 30th October 2026
International Conference Centre, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
Distinguished guests, members of the Odu’a Investment Foundation Advisory Council, leadership of Odu’a Investment Company, representatives of our six owner states, principals and teachers, members of the DEFINED Project team, partners, parents, and, most importantly, our Byte Busters.
Good afternoon.
Last year, standing at this Showcase, I spoke about runways and digital wings. I argued that if we gave our children the tools, exposure and opportunity, they could fly into the possibilities of the digital age.
One year later, we can say something more.
They are flying.
And because they are flying, the question before us has changed. It is no longer whether children in our public schools can learn to code, understand artificial intelligence, develop websites or build digital applications. They are showing us that they can.
The question now is bigger: how many of our children are we prepared to give this opportunity, and how boldly are we prepared to invest in their capacity to shape the future?
Because the future of Nigeria, and indeed Africa, should not simply arrive as something made elsewhere, programmed elsewhere and owned elsewhere. The future must carry our fingerprints. And those fingerprints must include those of the children sitting in our public schools today.
I begin with gratitude. I thank the leadership of Odu’a Investment Foundation and Odu’a Investment Company for continuing to believe in this vision. I particularly acknowledge Ambassador Dr Olatokunbo Awolowo Dosunmu, Chair of the Advisory Council, an exceptional leader of people; Otunba Bimbo Ashiru, the visionary Chairman of Odu’a Investment Company; and our unassuming Group Managing Director, Mr Abdulrahman Yinusa. I also thank our six owner states, their Ministries of Education, our school leaders and ICT teachers.
I thank our project team: Assistant Project Manager Temilorun Okediji, always going over and above, along with the brilliant duo of Oluwapelumi Adeosun, Christianah Ayoola, Yinka Babalola, who continues to be a key part of our journey, our Project Assistants, our fantastic college mentors and volunteers. Behind every confident presentation today are hours of teaching, travelling, troubleshooting and encouraging.
At our inaugural Showcase last year, approximately 100 pupils represented nine centres. Today, Byte Busters operates through 20 centres across all six South-West states, spanning 18 Local Government Areas. The programme has reached more than 4,500 learners, and more than 220 pupils are expected to participate this year.
Those numbers deserve celebration. But the more important story is what the children have begun to do.
This year, we are seeing projects that engage directly with the world around them: an AI-powered CBT platform; Tomato AI, exploring technology in agriculture; an Emergency Response System; a Sign Language application; and an AI-powered marketplace for local traders. Other teams are tackling post-harvest maize losses and building a Yoruba-English translation application.
Think about that progression. A child does not merely ask, “How does AI work?” The child begins to ask: Can AI help a farmer? Can technology help someone communicate? Can we build something for the trader in our community? Can our own languages have a place in the technologies of the future?
That is the journey from digital access to digital agency.
In my scholarship on entrepreneurship, digital transformation and the future of work, I return repeatedly to a fundamental point: technology does not distribute opportunity automatically. It can widen opportunity, but it can also widen inequality. What makes the difference is capability. Who understands the technology? Who can adapt it? Who can create with it? Who believes they belong in the rooms where the future is being designed?
These are not merely South-Western questions. They are Nigerian questions. They are African questions. Africa is the youngest continent in the world, entering an era in which digital capability, artificial intelligence and knowledge-intensive enterprise will increasingly shape productivity and power. A youthful population is not automatically a demographic dividend. It becomes one when young people are equipped to create value.
That is why DEFINED has significance beyond our immediate footprint. It is a proposition for Africa: talent is widely distributed even when opportunity is not; early exposure can convert curiosity into competence; and children in ordinary public schools can move from consumers of technology to creators of solutions.
The distance between those who merely consume intelligent technologies and those who understand, interrogate and build with them could become one of the defining inequalities of this century.
Teaching a child to code is therefore about much more than producing another programmer. We are teaching structured thinking, problem-solving and persistence. When something does not work, you examine it, debug it, try again, collaborate and build something better. Those are not simply digital skills. They are habits of agency.
That is why Byte Busters must never be treated as an extracurricular luxury. It is an investment in the productive and creative capacity of a generation.
DEFINED itself has continued to evolve. Lessons from the pilot led us to strengthen project-based learning, introduce summer bootcamps, invest further in facilitators, and make the Showcase a destination for learning. Education is at its most powerful when it moves the learner from knowing, to doing, and ultimately to creating.
But DEFINED is also working on the other side of the classroom. If Byte Busters equips pupils to become confident creators, our Digital Literacy Training for Teachers programme strengthens those who guide them every day. Earlier this year, 72 teachers from the six South-West states entered the first DLTT cohort, with 67 successfully completing it. The focus is practical: using digital tools more effectively to strengthen teaching and improve pupils’ learning experience.
This was never designed as training for 67 people. It was designed as a cascade. Those pioneer teachers are being equipped to train others in their communities, taking us towards our target of 3,000 teachers trained by the end of this year. Some are with us today, and I am delighted that we will also recognise them.
So, yes, there is much to celebrate. But celebration must not make us comfortable.
Twenty centres are progress. Eighteen Local Government Areas are progress. More than 4,500 learners reached is progress. But our ambition must be larger than our current footprint.
For every child standing here today, how many others possess the same intelligence, curiosity and creative potential, but attend a school where this opportunity has not yet arrived? Genius does not consult geography or family income before deciding where to be born.
Somewhere today, in a public school in Nigeria, there may be a girl who could become an extraordinary AI engineer. Somewhere in Africa, there may be a boy capable of developing an agritech solution that transforms food production. But potential without opportunity can remain invisible for a lifetime.
That is why the next phase of DEFINED must be about scale. And here I speak especially to our six owner states. Odu’a Investment Company belongs collectively to these states. DEFINED gives us a platform through which the South-West can make a deliberate regional investment in its next generation. If we demonstrate a model that works here, we can contribute something of real value to the wider Nigerian and African conversation about digital education.
I would like to see governments, businesses, old students’ associations, philanthropists and diaspora communities commit greater resources to this work: computers, connectivity, learning spaces, facilitators, equipment and sustained funding.
Not charity.
Investment.
Because these children are not objects of benevolence. They are human capital whose productive capacity we have barely begun to unlock.
The great competition of the coming decades will be between societies that prepared their young people to understand, adapt and create with technology, and societies that allowed them to remain merely consumers of what others created.
Africa still has a choice about which side of that divide it will occupy.
Last year, I asked us to give our children wings and the wind to soar. Today, I ask for something more ambitious.
Let us ensure that when the technologies, businesses and solutions of the next twenty years are being built, our children are not standing outside looking in.
Let them be inside. Let them be coding. Let them be questioning. Let them be inventing. Let them solve the problems of their communities. Let them build in Yoruba, English, Hausa, Igbo, Swahili, and in the languages of code that connect them to the world.
Let them encounter artificial intelligence not with fear, and not merely as consumers, but with curiosity, judgement and creative confidence.
Let us begin early enough, invest deeply enough and reach widely enough that opportunity is no longer an accident of geography.
Then, years from now, when we look at the digital economies of Nigeria and Africa, we will recognise our communities, our ideas, and solutions first imagined in classrooms like these.
And above all, we will see the fingerprints of the children we chose to invest in today.
Thank you.
Professor Seun Kolade
Project Director
Digital Education for Innovation and Economic Development (DEFINED) Project