Africa should author its tech future, not merely a market

By  Churchill Otieno

President

The Africa Editors Forum

Artificial intelligence is no longer waiting at Africa’s door. It is in classrooms, newsrooms, farms and clinics, answering students, helping inspect suspicious videos, delivering weather alerts and interpreting scans.

In each case, convenience arrives bundled with questions of power, trust and accountability.

The technology has arrived before most of our societies have agreed on the rules and values that should govern it. The urgent question is no longer whether Africa will use AI. It is whose knowledge these systems carry, whose languages they understand, whose problems they solve and whose interests they serve.

The opportunity is substantial. The International Monetary Fund’s July 2026 paper; Unlocking the Potential: AI in Sub-Saharan Africa, estimates that faster adoption, supported by reliable electricity, connectivity and skills, could lift regional GDP by about four per cent cumulatively over the next decade. Under current conditions, however, it estimates a median productivity effect of only 0.2 per cent.

That gap is the point. Technology does not erase old inequalities. Left unattended, it scales them.

The World Bank’s World Development Report 2026 estimates that AI could meaningfully boost productivity in 16.2 per cent of jobs in low- and middle-income countries, while 4.5 per cent of existing jobs face automation risk. Yet nearly one-third of rural schools in sub-Saharan Africa lack reliable electricity and more than two-thirds lack dependable internet. We cannot speak seriously about an AI future while treating power, connectivity, education and institutions as side issues.

Digital interface

African innovators are already building, but the systems around them remain unequal. A 2025 preprint covering 20 large, small and specialised language models identified support for 42 African languages and reported that more than 98 per cent of the continent’s roughly 2,000 languages remained unsupported.

A technology that cannot hear most Africans cannot claim to understand Africa.

AI also has an extractive underside. The cloud has a geology. Devices, data centres, power networks and backup batteries draw on copper, cobalt, lithium, graphite and other minerals. A US Geological Survey review estimates that the Democratic Republic of Congo supplied 73 per cent of mined cobalt in 2025. The IMF, meanwhile, counts only about 160 data centres across Africa, roughly 5.5 per cent of the global total.

That contrast should trouble us. If Africa exports ore and imports compute, the old extractive bargain has simply acquired a digital interface. The African Union’s Green Minerals Strategy points towards value addition and industrialisation. This must include transparent contracts, fair taxation, labour rights, community consent, environmental repair and investment in African processing, manufacturing and computing capacity.

African leadership in AI therefore cannot be reduced to coding talent or national strategies. It must include culture, ethics, extractive justice, law, journalism and public imagination. Dr Amani Abou-Zeid, then the African Union Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy, said in 2024: “Adapting AI to African realities is critical.”

South African engineer Tshilidzi Marwala, Rector of the United Nations University, offered an equally necessary caution in July: “You are not supposed to trust AI. You are supposed to use it, always doubt it, always verify what it tells you.”

Yesterday, during United Nations General Assembly week in New York, multidisciplinary groups established AfroFrequency to create space for that African work. They have invited tech builders, content creators, African scholars and more to join.

Public-interest journalism

AfroFrequency is a Pan-African movement bringing together artists, technologists, journalists, researchers, civic organisers, lawyers, policymakers and communities. These worlds too often meet after products have been built, harms have appeared, minerals have been contracted away or regulations are being rushed through. We intend to bring them together earlier, when the stories, systems, bargains and rules can still be shaped. This is not another conference circuit. It is an effort to turn conversation into cultural work, public-interest journalism, experiments, prototypes and policy influence. Following the New York launch, work will begin in Nairobi in October, expand to Johannesburg and Lagos, and culminate in the first AfroFrequency Festival in May 2027.

Why include artists and storytellers in a conversation assigned to engineers? Because technology begins in imagination before code. Stories define possible futures. Journalism tests claims and follows power, from datasets and procurement to mines and balance sheets. Lawyers translate rights into safeguards; communities supply knowledge datasets miss.

Africa needs investment in compute, energy, skills and research, and institutions through which citizens can question technology and policymakers can hear beyond the loudest corporate voice.

AfroFrequency will not answer these questions alone. Its purpose is to build a coalition capable of asking them together, then carrying the answers into the rooms where products, policies, contracts and public narratives are made.

The defining divide will not be between societies that use AI and those that do not. It will be between those that shape it and those who are shaped by it.

Africa must enter this future not merely as a market, a mine of data or a source of minerals, but as an author.

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Churchill Otieno is President of The Africa Editors Forum and Executive Director of the Eastern Africa Editors Society. He coordinates AfroFrequency. Email: [email protected]