Focus

Future Africa

By Cédric Gouverneur

Published on 28 September 2026 at 11h07

They are researchers, developers, coders and entrepreneurs. They are designing new models and building solutions for healthcare, agriculture, digital networks and energy. They share a common ambition: to create an artificial intelligence for Africa—one that speaks its languages, understands its realities and responds to its challenges. Above all, they refuse to let the continent remain a spectator in the technological revolution.

The capabilities of artificial intelligence are advancing at a pace that surprises even specialists. Karim Beguir, co-founder of InstaDeep, believes AI’s potential is still widely underestimated, noting that it already performs its tasks “as well as human experts in 90% of cases”—from detecting tumours more accurately than oncologists to solving highly complex scientific problems.

According to Beguir, a start-up with only a handful of employees can now compete, thanks to AI, with companies employing hundreds of people. And this is only the beginning. As we wrote last July, humanity is still living in the technological prehistory of these new tools. Left unchecked, such power could prove destructive. While the fear of machines enslaving humanity has long been a staple of science fiction—Terminator, directed by James Cameron in 1984, remains its most famous expression—the more likely future is one in which AI remains under human control. Even so, Dario Amodei, CEO of the American company Anthropic, warns that artificial intelligence could make countless jobs obsolete. Other leaders in the technology sector are more optimistic. James Manyika, Google’s Vice President for Technology and Society, argues that history shows a dominant technology ultimately creates more jobs than it destroys.

As a tool capable of rivalling Homo sapiens in many cognitive tasks, artificial intelligence demands vigilance from everyone—its creators, its users and its institutions. AI is first and foremost an instrument: like any powerful technology, it can be used recklessly or maliciously. Yet its growing applications across African agriculture already demonstrate that it also represents an extraordinary opportunity for development. The urgency is undeniable. Of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015 for achievement by 2030, only one-third are currently on track. Artificial intelligence could help close that gap.

For Africa, AI can—and must—become a powerful engine of leapfrogging: enabling economies to bypass costly developmental stages in scientific research, agriculture, energy transition and public services. Much as the rapid spread of mobile phones at the turn of the millennium allowed the continent to skip the era of extensive fixed-line telecommunications infrastructure, AI offers the possibility of accelerating development through innovation rather than imitation.

The appointment in 2023 of South African AI expert Tshilidzi Marwala as Rector of the United Nations University illustrates the importance the international community now attaches to these technologies as drivers of sustainable development.

For Africa, however, the greatest danger of the AI revolution is not technological—it is political. The continent risks losing its digital sovereignty to a new form of digital neo-colonialism, directed not from Paris, London or Lisbon, but from Silicon Valley or Hangzhou. In a global AI landscape dominated by Western and Asian powers, Africa could become little more than a dependent customer. That threat is already tangible. South African researcher Pelonomi Moiloa, founder of Lelapa AI, warns that AI applications trained predominantly on Eurocentric datasets reproduce racial biases inherited from apartheid within South Africa itself.

Kenyan AI specialist Sidney Essendi issues a similar warning: African countries that fail to invest in their own AI ecosystems today risk becoming permanently dependent on foreign providers—whether the American chipmaker NVIDIA or its Chinese rival DeepSeek, whose lower-cost models have nevertheless raised concerns over the handling of users’ data and search histories. Building a sovereign African AI ecosystem capable of driving development will require massive investment: constructing data centres, training the next generation of engineers and researchers, and supporting local innovation at scale. One thing, however, is certain. Among Africa’s greatest assets is its remarkable wealth of AI talent—women and men from academia, government and entrepreneurship who embody the continent’s determination to shape its own digital future.