AI for Justice in Nigeria: How Podus AI Is Widening Access to Justice
In Nigeria, needing a lawyer and being able to afford one are two very different things. When a market trader is detained without charge, when a tenant is threatened with an illegal eviction, or when a young person is stopped and extorted by the police, the law is on their side — but the help to enforce it usually is not. We built Podus AI to close that gap.
Podus AI is our “AI for Justice” platform: an AI legal assistant designed to give ordinary people fast, free legal guidance — and, when they need it, a route to a real lawyer. It is built by Citizens’ Gavel, the civic-technology organisation behind years of access-to-justice work in Nigeria.
What Podus AI actually does
We designed Podus AI to be reached the way you already communicate. It is free, and it works over WhatsApp, the web and our mobile app, covering Nigerian law across every locality. You can ask a legal question in plain language, understand your rights, and — crucially — draft the documents that move a complaint forward.
That last part matters most. Podus AI helps you draft petitions and complaint letters to the bodies that can actually act — the National Human Rights Commission, the Public Complaints Commission (Ombudsman), the FCCPC and state mediation centres. It turns a vague sense of “this is unfair” into a document an institution has to respond to.
Trained on Nigerian law — and built for emergencies
Podus AI is trained on the overwhelming majority of Nigerian law, so its answers reflect the rules that actually apply where you live. We tuned it deliberately to prioritise urgent, freedom-threatening situations rather than to behave like a general chatbot.
That means Podus AI is built to move fastest on cases like:
- Police extortion and brutality
- Fundamental human-rights violations
- Illegal arrest and detention
- Gender-based violence and abuse
“The goal of the project, in its simplest form, is to help the most vulnerable in society get access to justice.”
Podus AI is built to work with lawyers, not to replace them. It handles the first, high-volume layer of legal questions — the ones that do not need a courtroom — so human advocates can focus on the cases that do. For many people, that first answer is the difference between giving up and taking action.
Years of work behind one assistant
Podus AI did not appear overnight. Citizens’ Gavel was founded in 2017 to make justice more accessible in Nigeria, and we have spent years building the tools and the volunteer-lawyer network that Podus AI now sits on top of. During the 2020 #EndSARS protests, that network handled hundreds of intervention cases for people who had been arrested and detained. We later built Justice Clock, a case-tracking system launched with the Lagos State Government.
Podus AI, launched in 2024, is the AI-native step in that journey. More than 33,000 people have already used it, part of the 6,500+ legal interventions Citizens’ Gavel has handled since we started.
Why this matters
Access to justice has always been rationed by cost and geography. An AI assistant trained on Nigerian law, reachable over WhatsApp and free to use, changes that maths — not by replacing the courts, but by helping far more people take the first step. That is the promise we are building toward: legal help that meets people where they are.
Try it for yourself at chat.podus.ai.
Get legal guidance in minutes.
Try Podus AI