Sterling Bank, Aké Festival search cultural integration

 Sterling Bank has renewed its partnership with the Aké Arts and Book Festival, considered one of Africa’s foremost gatherings of writers, artists and thinkers, because the pageant returns to Lagos from 19 to 21 November 2026 with a dialog about Africa’s place in an more and more technology-driven world.

Now in its 14th version, the pageant will discover the theme ‘Native Intelligence’, analyzing the connection between the data Africans have developed and handed down for generations and the synthetic intelligence methods more and more influencing how individuals stay, study, work and talk.

The theme stems from a easy reality: Africa was considering lengthy earlier than machines had been. The elder, the proverb and the folktale signify methods of data refined over centuries. Today, synthetic intelligence is altering how tales are instructed, how elections are fought and the way reality is reported throughout the globe. Yet questions stay about how adequately African languages, experiences and cultural contexts are represented within the applied sciences more and more shaping the world.

For Sterling Bank, which has supported the pageant since 2018, the partnership represents a continued funding within the individuals and concepts shaping Africa’s cultural and mental future. Over the years, Aké has offered a gathering level for established and rising writers, artists and thinkers, bringing collectively greater than 1,000 inventive voices and creating alternatives for African tales and views to achieve wider audiences.

Commenting on this 12 months’s convening, Donatus Okpako, Chief Marketing Officer at Sterling Bank, acknowledged, “Every society has an intelligence, the instinct and judgement employed to read a situation and solve a problem. Africans have always had it in abundance.”

Lola Shoneyin, Founder and Director of the Aké Arts and Book Festival, stated, “A machine knows only what it has been fed, and it has not been fed much of us. Native Intelligence is about power: who decides what is true, what is worth remembering, and whose voice the future speaks in? Sterling understands our goal to support and celebrate creativity on the African continent and beyond. We are delighted to work with them again.”