Meet Nigerian innovator who built West Africa’s first AI-powered smart bench

Taiwo Okanlawon

In 2018, a young Nigerian innovator, Yagazie Patrick Anyanwu, set out to redefine how people interact with technology in public spaces. His vision was simple yet transformative: to create a smart bench that doesn’t just provide a place to sit but also connects people, powers devices, analyzes data, and learns from its environment.

Today, that vision stands as West Africa’s first AI-powered smart bench, a breakthrough that integrates renewable energy, artificial intelligence, and urban analytics to advance the smart-city movement across the continent.

A Smart Bench Built for the Future

Unlike conventional public benches, Yagazie’s creation combines multiple cutting-edge systems:

Solar-powered energy management, providing sustainable phone-charging and powering onboard sensors.

A Wi-Fi captive portal that offers free internet access while displaying targeted ads, allowing advertisers to reach audiences in real time and access engagement analytics.

A smart camera and machine-learning engine that observes environmental changes, tracks weather patterns, and even personalizes advertisements based on detected attributes such as outfit, brand, and gender.

This combination of renewable power, edge computing, and AI made the bench not only interactive but intelligent. It could predict energy consumption, optimize power usage, and send data reports to local authorities—supporting urban planning, sustainability, and public-safety efforts.

Merging AI, Data, and Human-Centered Design

Beyond hardware innovation, the project broke new ground in data annotation and predictive analytics. Each bench was trained on annotated datasets to understand environmental patterns enabling it to forecast local weather conditions and recommend context-relevant information to users. The system also analyzed ad-engagement metrics, helping businesses make data-driven decisions about customer behavior and outreach effectiveness.

This blend of machine learning and community engagement positioned the smart bench as an early model of how AI can power public infrastructure in developing economies bridging the digital divide while promoting clean energy and smart-city inclusion.

A Vision Beyond Technology

Yagazie’s work goes beyond engineering. It reflects a vision of Africa’s cities as hubs of intelligent, sustainable innovation. By merging solar energy, machine learning, and behavioral analytics, his smart bench represents a step toward democratizing access to information, internet connectivity, and data-driven decision-making for public administrators and private enterprises alike.

Recognition and Impact

The innovation has drawn attention from local governments, tech communities, and sustainability advocates across the region. It demonstrates that African ingenuity is not limited to software but extends to AI-enabled physical infrastructure capable of transforming public spaces into data-driven, energy-efficient ecosystems.