By
Vikramaditya Shrivastava
Africa-Press – Tanzania. A Continent at the Edge of a New Divide
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the organizing principle of global power, yet Africa—the world’s youngest continent and arguably the one with the most to gain—remains largely absent from the rooms where AI’s future is being negotiated. Across global AI summits—from safety forums to governance roundtables—Africa appears inconsistently, often represented by a few English-speaking states while the rest of the continent remains invisible.
The Economist captured part of this reality in a July 2024 analysis describing how Africa is being “left behind” in the AI revolution. The report pointed to the continent’s vast infrastructure gaps—unreliable electricity, limited data centers, weak connectivity—as the foundation of a new digital divide. But the image accompanying the piece, a dense neighborhood bristling with satellite dishes, tells a deeper story. It is not just about infrastructure. It is about a continent trying to connect to a world that rarely looks back.
The tragedy is not simply that Africa is missing from AI summits. It is that the regions most in need of AI—the Sahel, the Congo Basin, the Great Lakes, the Swahili Coast, and the Sahara belt—are missing even from Africa’s own internal digital imagination. These are the places where AI could deliver education without classrooms, healthcare without hospitals, and governance without physical presence. Yet they remain politically invisible, both to global powers and to African leaders themselves.
Big Tech’s Narrow Vision of Africa
To understand why Africa is excluded from the AI revolution, one must first understand how Big Tech sees the continent. The global AI ecosystem is dominated by a handful of actors—the United States, China, the European Union, India, Japan, and South Korea—whose priorities revolve around national security, industrial competition, and geopolitical leverage. Africa rarely appears in these calculations except as a resource base.
Digital Watch Observatory notes that Africa is treated primarily as a consumer of AI tools built elsewhere, not a producer or policymaker. This is reinforced by the economic logic of Silicon Valley and Shenzhen, which view Africa through a narrow commercial lens. The continent is a source of minerals essential for AI hardware, a reservoir of data from a young and mobile-first population, a pool of low-cost labor for data annotation, and a vast market for fintech and telecom products. But when it comes to decision-making, governance, or infrastructure investment, Africa is almost entirely absent.
This absence is not accidental. It is structural. Big Tech invests where it sees strategic returns—in countries with stable regulatory environments, strong compute infrastructure, and governments that actively court AI partnerships. Africa, with its fragmented digital landscape and limited bargaining power, does not fit this profile. Even the regions with the most transformative potential—where AI could diagnose malaria from a phone camera or teach children displaced by conflict—are ignored because they do not align with commercial incentives.
The Atlantic’s analysis of AI in Africa underscores this contradiction. It highlights how AI could transform agriculture, healthcare, logistics, and governance across the continent. Yet these possibilities remain largely theoretical because the world does not see Africa as a place where AI should be built—only as a place where AI should be deployed.
The Internal Failure: Africa’s Leaders Have Not Fought for Inclusion
It would be convenient to blame Big Tech alone for Africa’s exclusion. But the truth is more uncomfortable. African political leaders share equal responsibility for the continent’s absence from the AI revolution.
Most African governments still treat AI as a distant luxury—a topic for conferences in Geneva or San Francisco, not a tool for solving the continent’s most urgent crises. Only a handful of countries have national AI strategies, and even fewer invest in compute infrastructure, data governance, or AI-ready education. This detachment has consequences. When global AI summits convene, African leaders rarely demand inclusion. When AI governance frameworks are drafted, African diplomats seldom push for representation. When Big Tech companies expand into Africa, governments negotiate telecom contracts and mining deals, not AI research centers or cloud infrastructure.
This political inertia is particularly damaging for the regions already living at the margins of the continent’s imagination. In the Sahel, millions of children have not attended school in years because of conflict. In eastern Congo, communities have no access to healthcare. In the Great Lakes region, farmers struggle with climate shocks that AI-powered tools could help predict. In the Sahara belt, governance collapses because information cannot flow across vast distances. AI could transform these realities. But African leaders have not positioned AI as a continental priority—and the world has taken note.
The result is a vacuum that Big Tech has no incentive to fill. And the people who pay the price are those who stand to benefit the most from AI’s potential.
A Global Warning Africa Cannot Afford to Ignore
A few days ago, former UK chancellor George Osborne—now leading OpenAI’s “for countries” program—issued a blunt warning at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi: countries that do not embrace AI will be left behind. He argued that nations failing to adopt AI will become poorer and weaker and risk losing their workforce as people migrate to AI-enabled economies. He described a world where countries face a binary choice: adopt AI systems from the United States or adopt AI systems from China.
This warning applies more urgently to Africa than any other region. Africa is the only continent where Big Tech is not investing in AI capacity, where governments are not prioritizing AI, where infrastructure gaps are widening, and where the regions most in need are politically marginalized. The Economist’s reporting reinforces this. Africa’s infrastructure deficit makes it nearly impossible to build or train advanced AI models. Only 32 countries worldwide have the infrastructure to do so, and almost none are in Africa.
But infrastructure is only half the story. The other half is political will. Without leaders who understand AI’s transformative potential, Africa will remain a passive observer in a world where AI is becoming the foundation of economic power, national security, and global influence.
Conclusion: Africa Must Demand Its Place—No One Will Offer It
Africa’s exclusion from the AI revolution is not inevitable. It is the result of choices—by Big Tech, by global powers, and by African leaders themselves. The continent has the world’s youngest population, the fastest‑growing digital adoption, and the greatest potential for AI‑driven transformation. But potential means nothing without representation.
Africa must demand seats at global AI summits, invest in compute infrastructure, build AI‑ready education systems, and craft governance frameworks that reflect African realities. Because the regions most in need—the Sahel, the Congo Basin, the Great Lakes, the Swahili Coast, and the Sahara—cannot afford another century of being left out of global technological shifts.
Yet inclusion alone is not a cure‑all. As Brookings has argued, open‑access AI may empower African innovators, but it also exposes countries to new vulnerabilities—from misinformation to cyber risks—that many governments are not equipped to manage. Without regulatory capacity, digital literacy, and institutional safeguards, AI can widen inequalities rather than close them. Africa’s challenge, therefore, is not only to secure a place in the global AI order but also to build the governance structures needed to use AI responsibly once it arrives.
The AI revolution will reshape the world with or without Africa. But Africa still has a chance to decide whether it will be a participant—or a footnote.
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