The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have warned that artificial intelligence could worsen unemployment in Nigeria and other developing economies unless governments move quickly to prepare workers and steer the technology towards job creation. The warning came on Monday in Bangkok, Thailand, at a session titled Small AI: More and Better Jobs, which opened the 2026 IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings. The meetings run until October 18.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva described AI as “a slow-moving tsunami”, one whose effects on jobs, growth, education and tax revenue would be profound. She said about 40 per cent of jobs worldwide could be affected over time, with some roles enhanced and others downgraded or wiped out. The exposure is uneven, according to the Fund: about 60 per cent of jobs in advanced economies, against 23 per cent in low-income countries.
World Bank Group President Ajay Banga said the bank’s attention must remain fixed on employment. “The bank’s entire focus has to be on jobs,” he said, arguing that AI should raise productivity rather than simply replace workers. He named infrastructure, smallholder agriculture, primary healthcare, tourism and higher-value manufacturing as the five areas with the strongest job potential.
Banga’s case rests on what the bank calls Small AI. These are cheap, practical tools that run on basic phones and low bandwidth, built for local languages and modest budgets rather than expensive frontier systems. He gave the example of a farmer who photographs a diseased crop with an ordinary phone, receives treatment advice and is then linked to seeds, fertiliser, credit, insurance and buyers. Similar tools, he said, could help frontline health workers assess patients and refer serious cases to specialists.
The scale of the problem explains the urgency. Banga has built the bank’s strategy around a single gap: about 1.2 billion young people in developing countries will reach working age in the next 10 to 15 years, while current trends point to only about 400 million jobs. Nigeria, with one of the youngest populations in the world, sits near the centre of that arithmetic.
The World Bank’s October 2026 Africa Economic Update, released on October 6 under the title Building AI Readiness, names Nigeria alongside Kenya and South Africa as the continent’s main centres of AI activity. The report raised Nigeria’s growth forecast to 4.3 per cent for 2026, up from 4.0 per cent in 2025, and projects 4.4 per cent a year in 2027 and 2028. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole is expected to grow by 4.3 per cent this year.
The bank was blunt about the limits of that growth. It said expansion driven by oil and minerals often has weak links to jobs and household incomes, and that per capita income growth of 1.8 per cent this year is too modest to transform living standards. “The next challenge is turning growth into more jobs and better opportunities,” said Andrew Dabalen, the bank’s chief economist for Africa.
The foundations for AI remain thin. According to the report, about 900 million Africans are still offline, and the continent holds 18 per cent of the world’s population but only 0.6 per cent of global data centre capacity. It also supplies about two per cent of the data used to train AI systems. Unreliable electricity, poor connectivity, weak digital skills and low quality data are listed as the main brakes on adoption.
The wider global divide is starker still. The World Bank’s Digital Progress and Trends Report 2025 found that high-income countries account for 87 per cent of notable AI models, 86 per cent of AI startups and 91 per cent of global venture capital for AI. Low-income countries produce less than one per cent of ChatGPT traffic and have almost no data centre capacity, while basic digital skills range from under five per cent of people in poor countries to 66 per cent in rich ones.
Nigeria’s official jobless figures can mask the depth of the problem. Under the revised method the National Bureau of Statistics adopted in 2023, anyone who works at least one hour in a week counts as employed, which pushed the headline rate down from 33.3 per cent in late 2020 to single digits. The same surveys show that about 93 per cent of working Nigerians are in the informal economy, where incomes are low and job security is rare.
Workers in the formal sector say the shift is already under way. Fanimokun Adesina, acting President of the Association of Senior Staff of Banks, Insurance and Financial Institutions, told a World Day for Decent Work event in Lagos that digital skills, AI and robotics were “already displacing many workers”. He urged members to learn new workplace technologies to remain relevant.
The Bangkok meetings continue this week, with a session on mobilising private capital for jobs scheduled for October 14. Finance ministers and central bank governors, including Nigeria’s delegation, are expected to take part in the discussions on growth, investment and employment.