What I learned mapping the AI safety ecosystem — and what's missing for Africa

From August 2024 to May 2025, I worked with AI Watch, collaborating with a global team to map the AI safety landscape — researching organisations, tools, and products, and building a database of who's doing what in the field.

The work involved time-sensitive literature reviews, extracting details on labs and safety initiatives (from OpenAI to smaller research groups), and structured data analysis.

What surprised me most: how concentrated the field is in the US/UK/Europe, and how few contributors understand contexts like Nigeria's — informal economies, weaker regulatory capacity, different risks.

That gap is why I'm designing an AI Economic Impact Tracker, a framework to study how AI affects education and youth employment in Nigeria.

I'm looking to contribute to AI governance research, especially work relevant to low- and middle-income countries. If you're working on this, I'd love to connect.