The Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) has renewed a strategic partnership with major brewing companies in Nigeria to intensify efforts against drunk-driving and improve road safety nationwide.

The renewed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed with members of the Beer Sectoral Group (BSG), extends the collaboration for another five years, with both sides pledging to deepen public awareness, enforcement and community engagement.

FRSC Corps Marshal, Shehu Mohammed, said the partnership underscores the importance of synergy between government and the private sector in addressing road crashes, particularly those linked to alcohol consumption.

He stressed that saving lives on Nigerian roads requires sustained collaboration, adding that the corps would continue to work with industry players to promote responsible behaviour among motorists.

Speaking on behalf of the BSG, Managing Director of Nigerian Breweries Plc and Chairman BSG, Thibaut Boidin, said the renewal reflects the industry’s commitment to sustained collaboration with regulators. He cited previous joint campaigns, including the Don’t Drink and Drive Campaign, as impactful, adding that the next phase would focus on expanding reach and strengthening implementation.

Also speaking, the Managing Director of Guinness Nigeria, Girish Sharma, said the industry remains committed to supporting initiatives that promote safer roads. He noted that while alcoholic beverages are often blamed for road crashes, the real issue lies in irresponsible consumption, particularly drinking and driving.

“We are here to work with you and ensure that this programme grows bigger and delivers real impact. Saving lives is what matters most,” he said.

Similarly, Chief Executive Officer of International Breweries Plc, Nicholas Kade, commended the FRSC for its dedication, describing the corps’ efforts as critical to making communities safer. He said the brewing industry would continue to support initiatives that promote responsible drinking and road safety.

The Executive Director of the Beer Sectoral Group, Abiola Laseinde, described the renewal as a milestone in public-private collaboration.

She said the partnership had driven nationwide campaigns against drunk-driving, influenced behaviour and reached millions of Nigerians with road safety messages.

Laseinde added that both parties would scale up interventions in the next five years to further reduce crashes and promote responsible alcohol consumption.

The FRSC and BSG’s partnership has been central to national campaigns discouraging drunk-driving, with stakeholders expressing optimism that the renewed agreement will deliver stronger outcomes.

Pleias and the GSMA have announced the release of CommonLingua, an open-source language identification (LID) model purpose-built to unlock African language data at scale. It is delivered under the GSMA’s AI Language Models in Africa, by Africa, for Africa initiative, a coalition dedicated to closing the African language gap in AI.

Africa is home to more than 2,000 living languages, many of which remain underrepresented in AI training data. As a result, language identification systems often perform less reliably on African-language content, particularly when distinguishing between closely related or code-mixed text. Before a Swahili, Yoruba, or Wolof language model can be built, the underlying text must first be correctly identified by language – a step where existing tools currently often fail on African content.

This is because leading LID systems such as fastText, GlotLID, and OpenLID were built around European and Asian high-resource languages and frequently mislabel African-language text as English or French. Even state-of-the-art frontier models drop roughly 30 points in accuracy on African languages compared to major world languages.

CommonLingua is designed to fix this first step of the pipeline. On the new CommonLID benchmark, CommonLingua achieves 83% accuracy and a macro score F1 of 0.79, outperforming leading LID models by more than 10 percentage points under comparable evaluation conditions, while using roughly one three-hundredth of the parameters. The model is lightweight at 2 million parameters and shipping as an 8 MB checkpoint, and is designed for efficient deployment, running approximately 20 texts per second on CPU and up to 3,000 texts per second on a single GPU.

CommonLingua covers 334 languages in total, including 61 African languages across eight language families: Bantu (21), Niger-Congo / West African (18), Afro-Asiatic and Semitic (7), Cushitic and Chadic (4), Berber (3), Nilo-Saharan (3), and pidgins, creoles, and other (5). The model operates directly on UTF-8 byte sequences rather than relying on a language-specific tokenizer, enabling consistent handling across scripts including Latin, Arabic, Ethiopic, N’Ko, and Tifinagh.

“African languages are not an edge case. They are the working languages of hundreds of millions of people, and they deserve AI infrastructure built with the same care as any other language. CommonLingua is deliberately the first brick we are laying: you cannot curate what you cannot identify” said Pierre-Carl Langlais, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Pleias.

The model is trained exclusively on open-licensed and public domain content aggregated through the Common Corpus project, including Wikipedia, Scientific publications in OpenAlex, VOA Africa, WaxalNLP, Cultural Heritage, and Pralekha. All datasets are released under permissive licenses.

Louis Powell, Director of AI Initiatives at GSMA added: “Closing the gap in African-language AI is is fundamental to digital inclusion and unlocking economic opportunity. Progress has long been held back by the lack of foundational infrastructure, beginning with something as essential as language identification.

“CommonLingua addresses this critical gap, enabling the development of richer datasets and more representative AI systems at scale. Through our initiative, the GSMA is bringing partners together to move beyond fragmented efforts towards shared infrastructure that can power Africa’s digital ecosystem.”

This conversation will continue at MWC26 Kigali, where GSMA and partners will bring together industry leaders to accelerate progress on African-language AI. Register now to be part of the discussion.

Africa’s leading payments technology company, Flutterwave and Activate Success International Foundation (ASIF) have announced a partnership to advance youth entrepreneurship, digital financial inclusion, and enterprise development across Nigeria.

The collaboration, anchored on the 2026 edition of the Youth Entrepreneurship and Empowerment Programme (YEEP), brings together two institutions with a shared commitment to expanding economic opportunity for young Nigerians.

This initiative aligns with broader national priorities around financial inclusion and youth economic participation. Expanding access to digital financial tools remains critical to unlocking productivity within Nigeria’s largely informal economy and enabling young people to participate more effectively in formal economic systems.

Both organisations will also explore opportunities to connect beneficiaries to additional enterprise support programmes, strengthening pathways for sustainable business growth.

Over the past 10 years, ASIF has built one of Nigeria’s credible platforms for enterprise development through YEEP, providing young entrepreneurs with access to training, mentorship, and funding. In 2025 alone, the programme deployed over ₦50 million in cash and equipment grants to support carefully selected young Nigerians, who submitted business proposals to build viable businesses.

YEEP 2025 recorded over 2,000 participants, while ASIF’s broader youth engagement ecosystem, including NYSC orientation camp activations, reached over 30,000 young people across the country.

As Lead Sponsor of YEEP 2026, Flutterwave will support the programme while integrating its full payment ecosystem, led by Send App, its flagship cross-border remittance platform, alongside merchant solutions and digital financial infrastructure. This will equip the youth with the tools to seamlessly receive payments from anywhere, manage transactions, and scale sustainable businesses.

Speaking on the partnership, Founder and CEO, Flutterwave, Olugbenga Agboola, said: “Nigeria’s youthful population is its greatest strength. The ambition is already there, what’s needed is access to the right tools to unlock it. For 10 years, Flutterwave has been building the infrastructure that powers opportunity, helping individuals and businesses transact, grow, and scale across borders.

Through this partnership with ASIF, we’re deepening that impact by equipping young entrepreneurs with the tools to build sustainable businesses, while platforms like Send App give them the ability to receive payments globally and connect to opportunities beyond their immediate environment.”

“This partnership is part of our commitment to powering Nigerian businesses through accessible financial infrastructure. Through this collaboration, our payment solutions will be introduced to young Nigerians, including corps members participating in NYSC orientation programmes across Abuja and other states.

Speaking also, Founder/CEO, ASIF, Love Idoko-Uloko, said: “Young Nigerians do not need to be rescued; they need to be resourced. Our work through YEEP has consistently focused on providing real opportunities like funding, skills, and access. Partnering with Flutterwave strengthens this mission and expands the impact for every entrepreneur we support.”

YEEP 2026 is scheduled to take place on June 8, 2026 in Abuja. Beyond YEEP 2026, the partnership will extend to NYSC orientation camp engagements across the country, where thousands of corps members will gain exposure to digit financial tools, including payment solutions, merchant services, and financial management capabilities.