References

African Digital Cultures: Platforms, Publics, and Infrastructures

James Yeku, Leah Junck (eds)

Analyzing the innovative and popular uses of digital media technologies across many African countries, African Digital Cultures reveals how digitization, through its inherent computational and epistemological logics, is deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people, producing new structures of feeling and new possibilities for political participation, cultural expression, and creative agency. This book grapples with the affective elements of mediatized social relations and consciousness, as platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, and TikTok increasingly inform the construction of diverse kinds of publics—from the religious and political to the sexual and the literary. Focusing on the creative and disruptive uses of social media platforms, financial technologies, digital infrastructures, and artificial intelligence, this collection brings together scholars whose work challenges the notion of Africa as a place of technological lack, underscoring the rich histories and contributions of the continent to global digital media. This interdisciplinary volume offers an essential and decolonizing understanding of digital media cultures and histories from an African perspective.

The Open-Source Paradox: Africa's Digital Sovereignty and the Structural Limits of Artificial Intelligence Autonomy

Ololade A. Shonubi

Open-source artificial intelligence is widely promoted as a democratising pathway to digital sovereignty for African states, offering access to frontier architectures without prohibitive capital investment. This paper investigates whether open-source AI represents a credible route to autonomy or generates a new form of structural dependency. Drawing on the National Innovation System (NIS) theory and the political economy of cloud infrastructure, the paper argues that open-source AI transfers model weights but neglects the structural foundations of capability: compute infrastructure, localised data and indigenous human capital. A structured narrative review demonstrates that Africa's research marginalisation, chronic infrastructure financing deficits and reliance on foreign cloud services collectively undermine the promise of open-source AI's sovereignty. The analysis establishes that the compute layer, not the code layer, is the primary locus of power: consequently, adoption of foreign infrastructure relocates rather than resolves dependency. Three analytical contributions are advanced: a theoretically grounded critique of the open-source paradox that integrates NIS and Big AI scholarship; an integrative framework that applies these resources to the African case; and a Digital Bandung collective action framework. This proposal presents the Digital Bandung framework as a heuristic device and an ideal type. By utilising this historical analogy, the paper illustrates a strategic logic for collective action rather than a rigid policy prescription, acknowledging that the original Bandung spirit must be modernised for the digital age. While treating Africa as a focal case, the study acknowledges that this approach risks obscuring significant intra-continental variation.

The Role of Generative AI in Addressing Development Challenges in LMICs

Fola Adeleke, Leah Junck, Ayantola Alayande, Samuel Segun, Rosalind Parkes-Ratanshi, Aarushi Gupta, Urvashi Aneja, Joao Victor Archegas, Scott Mahoney, Mark Gaffley, Rachel Adams

Background In late 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, igniting a global boom around generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Governments, businesses and individuals began to rapidly incorporate these powerful technologies into everyday processes and tasks, heralding a new era of technology use, most notably in wealthy nations. Questions remain about what value these technologies may have for addressing intractable socio-economic challenges facing lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where the benefits they offer are needed the most. To begin to answer these questions, the Gates Foundation launched the Global Grand Challenges program on “Catalyzing Equitable Artificial Intelligence (AI) Use” to explore the potential of GenAI technologies to help solve some of the world’s greatest problems. The Grand Challenges program awarded a total of over US$7.5 million to 50 projects based in LMICs across Africa, Asia and South America. A Network of Experts, led by the South Africa-based Global Center on AI Governance, was appointed to support projects in strengthening the ethical and gender-transformational components of their work and in generating evidence about the potential of GenAI to address socio-economic challenges in LMIC contexts. This report summari

The Labour We Do Not Dream Of

Selamawit Engida Abdella

Operationalizing AI Policy in Africa with the NIST AI Risk Management Framework

Steven Yirenkyi

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly recognized as a technology that can improve government operations in Africa. It enhances policy processes, strengthens decision-making, increases efficiency, and transforms public service delivery. Yet, public sector adoption of AI systems in African countries remains low.

Social Media and the Reconfiguration of National Security in Africa

Rachel Adams

This essay is adapted from an intervention I gave at the Mashariki Cooperation Conference, which took place in Diani, Kenya, from the 8th-11th April 2026.

Press freedom in the age of AI

Fola Adeleke

Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity, Fola Adeleke, highlights how the erosion of traditional media business models and the rise of AI-driven disinformation pose a grave threat to democratic discourse. He recently featured as a speaker at an Atlantic Institute's XR Lab event on the implications of artificial intelligence.

Charting New Territory: Digital Humanities und Künstliche Intelligenz in den African Studies

Frédérick Madore, Vincent Hiribarren

Vom 18. bis 20. Februar 2026 kamen 26 Forschende aus 16 Ländern im Schloss Herrenhausen in Hannover zusammen. Vorträge gab es keine. Stattdessen wechselten sich Plenarsitzungen, vier thematische Arbeitsgruppen, World-Café-Runden, Posterpräsentationen und gemeinsames Schreiben ab. Das Ziel war nicht bloß ein Austausch über die eigene Forschung, sondern ein kollektives Positionspapier. Am Ende des zweiten Tages schrieb die Gruppe bereits gemeinsam.

Digitizing ELTV Television of the Liberia Broadcasting System (LBS) - Liberia

Cassandra Mark-Thiesen

DOCiD is a unique persistent identifier for African research outputs.

Tech Justice in Africa

Ayantola Alayande, Fola Adeleke, Ivy Gikonyo, Leah Junck, Mark Gaffley, Michael Aboneka, Rachel Adams, Selamawit Engida Abdella, Tami Koroye

Advancing Tech Justice in Africa examines technology governance across Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa three countries that together anchor West, East, and Southern Africa's digital trajectories. African digitalisation is intersecting with deep structural inequalities in labour, gender, climate, health, and civic life. This report situates these contemporary shifts within the continent's longer histories of extraction and inequality, arguing that policymaking and legal reform must be grounded in the lived realities of workers, communities, activists, and the broader public. The report examines regional and sub-regional governance frameworks, mapping where norms are advancing through the African Union, sub-regional bodies, and judicial interventions and where critical gaps remain. It finds that while strategic litigation is gaining ground however,, enforcement gaps, weak ratification of key instruments, and limited access to remedies continue to constrain effective tech justice across the continent. At the country level, the report documents how these tensions play out in practice The findings offer critical insights into how African institutions and policy frameworks can respond to the evolving digital landscape while safeguarding rights and accountability. This event aims to foster dialogue and collaboration among key stakeholders committed to advancing technology governance and digital rights in Africa.

African Content Moderators Have Worse Mental Health than Global Peers, Study Finds

Billy Perrigo

A new study finds African content moderators report worse mental health than global peers, amid low pay, precarious work, and exposure to traumatic content.

Decoloniality impact assessment for AI

Damian Eke, Ricardo Chavarriaga, Bernd Stahl

In the last decade, several organisations, and national and international agencies have developed impact assessments (IAs) to mitigate the risks and impact of AI systems as well as to promote responsible, just and trustworthy design, development and deployment. However, through a critical review of current AI IAs, we identify the failure of these IAs to address fundamental questions regarding who defines problems, whose knowledge is valued, and who truly benefits from AI innovation or generally what we term the ‘coloniality problem’. Developed primarily within Global North normative frameworks, these IAs risk perpetuating the very inequalities they aim to address by neglecting Global South perspectives and the extractive logic underpinning data practices. Thus, we propose a novel approach: Decoloniality Impact Assessment (DIA) as a critical, context-sensitive evaluative approach that assesses AI systems in relation to their inherent colonial legacies, global power asymmetries, and epistemic injustices. It moves beyond traditional ethical frameworks by interrogating how the AI innovation lifecycle and practices reinforce structural inequalities, marginalise local knowledge systems, and perpetuate exploitative systems. The paper advocates for an AI innovation lifecycle approach to DIA, recognising that coloniality manifests at every stage of AI development, from ideation to deployment. DIA is not a new impact assessment framework but an approach that can be integrated into already existing frameworks such as the Council of Europe’s HUDERIA framework. It is a call to reframe AI innovation in a way that technological futures are rooted in justice, pluriversality, and sovereignty.

Zimbabwe National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy 2026 – 2030

Ministry of Information Communication Technology Postal & Courier Services

WAXAL: A Large-Scale Multilingual African Language Speech Corpus

Abdoulaye Diack, Perry Nelson, Kwaku Agbesi, Angela Nakalembe, MohamedElfatih MohamedKhair, Vusumuzi Dube, Tavonga Siyavora, Subhashini Venugopalan, Jason Hickey, Uche Okonkwo, Abhishek Bapna, Isaac Wiafe, Raynard Dodzi Helegah, Elikem Doe Atsakpo, Charles Nutrokpor, Fiifi Baffoe Payin Winful, Kafui Kwashie Solaga, Jamal-Deen Abdulai, Akon Obu Ekpezu, Audace Niyonkuru, Samuel Rutunda, Boris Ishimwe, Michael Melese, Engineer Bainomugisha, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Andrew Katumba, Claire Babirye, Jonathan Mukiibi, Vincent Kimani, Samuel Kibacia, James Maina, Fridah Emmah, Ahmed Ibrahim Shekarau, Ibrahim Shehu Adamu, Yusuf Abdullahi, Howard Lakougna, Bob MacDonald, Hadar Shemtov, Aisha Walcott-Bryant, Moustapha Cisse, Avinatan Hassidim, Jeff Dean, Yossi Matias

The advancement of speech technology has predominantly favored high-resource languages, creating a significant digital divide for speakers of most Sub-Saharan African languages. To address this gap, we introduce WAXAL, a large-scale, openly accessible speech dataset for 21 languages representing over 100 million speakers. The collection consists of two main components: an Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset containing approximately 1,250 hours of transcribed, natural speech from a diverse range of speakers, and a Text-to-Speech (TTS) dataset with over 180 hours of high-quality, single-speaker recordings reading phonetically balanced scripts. This paper details our methodology for data collection, annotation, and quality control, which involved partnerships with four African academic and community organizations. We provide a detailed statistical overview of the dataset and discuss its potential limitations and ethical considerations. The WAXAL datasets are released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/WaxalNLP under the permissive CC-BY-4.0 license to catalyze research, enable the development of inclusive technologies, and serve as a vital resource for the digital preservation of these languages.

Wikipedia as an Open Access Tool for Restituting Knowledge on African Past

Anaïs Wion

The Langarchiv project, officially titled “Language as Archive: European Linguistics and the Social History of the Sahara and Sahel in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century,” is an ambitious research initiative funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Its primary goal is to explore how African languages can serve as archives for writing the social history of the Sahara and Sahel regions during the 18th and 19th centuries. The project is hosted by the Institut des Mondes Africains (IMAF), Paris, and led by historian Camille Lefebvre (CNRS / EHESS), in collaboration with Ari Awagana (Leipzig University) and with a team of linguists, historians, and anthropologists.

"Tintin au pays des archives" : pourquoi les millions d'archives belges de l’Africa Museum intéressent Bill Gates et les Américains

Eric Boever, Alice Dulczewski, Damien Roulette

C’est une histoire qui pourrait s’intituler "Tintin au pays des archives" ! Les tonnes d’archives qui sommeillent à l’Africa Museum, l’ancien Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale à Tervuren, sont au cœur d’un bras de fer entre la Belgique, la République démocratique du Congo et une société privée américaine. Au cœur du débat, la numérisation de ces archives censées contenir d’inestimables informations sur les richesses minières de l’Afrique centrale et sur leur localisation. L’Etat belge entend mener lui-même la digitalisation de ce trésor afin de le rendre accessible au plus grand nombre mais une société américaine, qui a l’appui des autorités congolaises, souhaite numériser les documents et profiter au passage de la primeur des informations qu’ils contiennent. Un différend aux enjeux économiques autant que diplomatiques.

Data centers are racing to space — and regulation can’t keep up

Damilare Dosunmu

Experts warn the move could shift critical infrastructure beyond national laws — deepening digital dependence for much of the developing world.

Toward AI Governance Alignment in Africa, Middle East, and Türkiye (AMET) Region

Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem, Fola Adeleke, Jake Effoduh, Kebene Wodajo, Nagla Rizk, Olubayo Adekanmbi, Rachel Adams, Rami Alkarmi, Seani Rananga, Seydina Ndiaye, Shikoh Gitau, Tami Koroye

Africa's leading voice in AI policy and governance, working globally to shape fair and inclusive technologies.

RD Congo. Tensions entre la Belgique et les États-Unis sur les archives minières - Analyse

Colette Braeckman

Analyse · L’accès aux archives minières congolaises, qui datent de l’époque coloniale et qui sont conservées au musée royal de l’Afrique centrale de Tervuren, en Belgique, est revendiqué par une société états-unienne soutenue par Jeff Bezos et Bill Gates. Mais Bruxelles (comme l’Europe) n’entend pas se faire doubler sur l’accès aux minerais stratégiques dont regorge le sous-sol de son ancienne colonie.

The Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review of Funding Dynamics and Digital Sovereignty (2019-2025)

Stephen E. Moore, Chris Kurbom Tieru

As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly reshapes global economies, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) faces a critical geopolitical juncture between unprecedented technological leapfrogging and a new era of digital dependency. This study aimed to empirically audit the geographic and sectoral distribution of over $2 billion in corporate AI capital deployed across the continent from 2019 to 2025. While existing literature extensively theorises on AI ethics, a serious structural transparency gap complicates the physical and financial realities of infrastructural capture by the Global North, making this independent mapping practically and academically vital. Utilising the PRISMA 2020 framework, this research conducted a systematic review and thematic synthesis of primary corporate disclosures and grey literature, analysed through the lens of Digital World-Systems Theory. The findings reveal a hyper-concentration of capital, engineering a technology hub hegemony strictly within South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. Furthermore, a profound terrestrial bias demonstrates that foreign organisations secured foundational compute architecture, specifically subsea cables and hyperscale data centres, years before engaging in local policymaking or mass workforce skilling. By transitioning from theoretical decolonial evaluation to empirical financial tracking, this study fills a critical literature void, proving that current corporate deployments actively foster ecosystem lock-in rather than true algorithmic sovereignty. Therefore, to realise the African Union's Agenda 2063, regional policymakers must urgently de-privatise critical compute infrastructure, mandate corporate financial transparency, and decouple local entrepreneurial innovation from mandatory foreign cloud monopolies.