References

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.

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.

A Handwritten Text Recognition Dataset for Ajami Manuscripts in Fulfulde and Hausa

Oreen Yousuf, Abdulmalik Aminu, Musa Salih Muhammad, Bashir Usman, Mustapha Kurfi Hashim, Joakim Nivre, Beáta Megyesi, Christian Høgel

We present the first ever dataset of manually segmented and transcribed Ajami manuscripts written in Fulfulde and Hausa. The term Ajami refers to modified Arabic-script orthographies in Africa. Existing handwritten text recognition (HTR) and optical character recognition (OCR) models for Arabic-script languages perform poorly on West African manuscripts due to a lack of these manuscripts representation in the models’ pre-training. This leads to models struggling to adapt to Ajami style calligraphy, being unequipped to recognize Ajami specific characters, and being unable to extract certain Arabic-script diacritics which are present in Ajami manuscripts but lacking in many manuscripts for other Arabic-script languages like Arabic and Persian. The latter poses a significant challenge to Ajami HTR. We release the following as an open-source dataset: an ALTO formatting of high-quality images of Fulfulde and Hausa manuscripts, manual segmentation (region and line), and manual transcriptions. Our HTR dataset is also the first to diplomatically transcribe newly Unicode-encoded, special Quranic recitation characters. We evaluate a suite of Arabic-script recognition models specifically for historical manuscripts and find that they produce character error rates of 65–84% when attempting to automatically transcribe our curated manuscripts. Transcriptions produced by the evaluated models are released as well.

The value of inclusion of African Languages in AI

Chenai Chair

You Should Anthropomorphise Your AI — Just Not Into a Companion

Abi Awomosu

The sycophancy isn’t a bug. Companions are designed to need your loneliness. Councils are designed to end it.

My Unpackable Library: AI Erasures and the African Archive

James Yékú

Text of Keynote Remarks delivered at the Africana Librarians Council’s 2026 spring meeting on April 16, 2026.

Controlling the narratives: three generations of Zarma genealogists and historian-griots from Niger confronting recording and digitization

Sandra Bornand

This article examines how three generations of jasare – Zarma genealogists and historian griots from Niger – have responded to the challenges of recording and digitizing their performances, from analogue archives to social media platforms. It explores the tensions between performance and fixation, the transformation and circulation of narratives, and the question of ownership in the context of mediated orality. The first generation resisted state-led archival initiatives in the 1960s. The second adapted their discourse to radio audiences, navigating censorship and self-regulation. Since the death of Jeliba Baaje in 2018, the third generation – no longer active performers – has grappled with the ethical and symbolic stakes of managing digital archives, especially as renewed interest in jasare narratives emerges on platforms such as YouTube and WhatsApp. Drawing on long-term ethnographic collaboration, the article analyses the aesthetic and political strategies employed to preserve control over sensitive narratives in contexts where audience composition is diffuse or unknown. These strategies are situated within broader transformations of patronage systems, memory politics and digital circulation. Ultimately, the article reflects on how oral knowledge systems engage with global regimes of authorship, highlighting the dynamic interplay between tradition, performance ethics and the logics of new media.

Du Bénin au Sénégal, ces chercheuses en IA qui s'attaquent aux vrais problèmes

FRANCE 24

Et si le futur le plus utile de l'IA s'écrivait en Afrique ? Alors que l’Unesco et l'AI Movement de Rabat les mettent à l'honneur, zoom sur les recherches de cinq femmes scientifiques, du Bénin au Maroc en passant par le Sénégal, le Cameroun et la Côte d'Ivoire. Leur point commun ? Elles refusent l'IA "gadget" et s'attaquent à des urgences du quotidien : purifier l'eau, anticiper les fuites, sauver les récoltes ou encore éradiquer le paludisme. #IA #Afrique #Sénégal

The Artificial Intelligence Bill, 2026

Unknown Author