Nigerian-born data governance analyst, Valentina Palama, is shaping a measurable approach to artificial intelligence that links law, data, and the public interest across sectors.
As the world weighs the promise and the risks of artificial intelligence, Valentina Palama is being noted as one of Nigeria’s clearer voices for ethical, data-driven governance.
According to her, the point is simple: if people cannot understand or challenge a decision, the technology has not earned their trust.
At Prairie View A and M University in Texas, where she is an AI Governance Research Analyst, Palama describes her day-to-day work as turning rules into tools. She says dense regulations are converted into clean datasets, brief notes, and meeting-ready visuals so senior teams can see trade-offs quickly and act with evidence, not headlines.
Materials show that her methods are deliberately plain. Small scorecards track accuracy, timeliness, subgroup fairness, override rate, and incident count, while regular reviews and tamper-evident records keep projects accountable without slowing delivery. In her words, governance should be routine, not theatrical.
Between August 2023 and May 2025, Palama says her team reviewed transportation-related AI requirements across multiple United States jurisdictions and produced crosswalks that made conflicts and overlaps easier to see. She explains that this work helps committees shorten internal reviews and ensures decisions are documented from the start.
On the technical side, Palama supports data preparation in R and Python so analysts can test ethical risk scenarios and see how governance choices influence outcomes over time. She says the aim is to make complex systems predictable and explainable before they reach the public.
Palama argues that the stakes for Nigeria are immediate. She says the country needs AI that improves services without widening gaps in access, and that agencies should require documentation, a meaningful human override, and an auditable trail before any tool reaches citizens.
She links this approach to capacity and sovereignty. Palama says locally owned methods reduce vendor dependence, fit the realities of overstretched institutions, and support practical conversations within ECOWAS on cross-border data by insisting on documentation and redress.
According to Palama, the 2025 portfolio focuses on what ministries and regulators can use today. She points to standards alignment briefs that map Nigerian obligations to international principles without copying foreign law, and policy crosswalks that show gaps at a glance for legislators and oversight units.
She adds that decision-support memos set out options, trade-offs, and safeguards for public procurement, while governance scorecards keep projects measurable over time. Capacity notes in plain language guide analyst teams on documentation, change control, and incident response so everyday practice matches policy.
Peer-reviewed work published in August 2025 extends the same thread. Palama and co-authors report in PriMera Scientific Engineering on how artificial intelligence and cyber threat intelligence can support risk controls in data-driven enterprises. She says the lesson for boards is practical: model simplicity, clear documentation, and timely response travel well from plan to practice.
A companion systematic review in the Asian Journal of Research in Computer Science links AI-driven therapeutic design with cloud cybersecurity for rare genetic diseases. Palama says the paper sets out safeguards such as differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, adversarial training, and federated learning so sensitive data is protected while clinical innovation continues.
She notes that her materials align with the Nigeria Data Protection Act and the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation and sit alongside duties in the National Health Act and the National Health Insurance Authority law. The effect, she says, is to let institutions buy and build with confidence and to keep patients in view.
Colleagues who have worked with Palama describe a steady bridge between technical and legal teams. They say she is comfortable with Python, R, SQL, Tableau, and Power BI, and with privacy and security frameworks used by agencies and hospitals. Palama’s own summary is direct: clear roles, measured results, and a public record that builds trust.
Looking ahead, Palama says the markers of progress are clear. She points to pilots that start small and report results, contracts that treat AI as infrastructure with service levels, and short internal summaries that show what changed and why. These are the signals, she says, that governance is moving from talk to practice.
Her message is steady. Palama says data without governance is power without accountability and that Nigeria’s next step is to make transparent and explainable systems a normal part of service and policy so the benefits of artificial intelligence reach people where it matters most.
