Africa’s AI ambitions take the spotlight in Rwanda
Rwanda is hosting a spotlight on Africa's ambitions in AI. The country is showcasing its advancements in artificial intelligence. The event highlights the growing interest and investment in AI across the continent. African nations are eager to harness the potential of AI for economic development and innovation.
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Artificial intelligence is taking center stage in Rwanda this week as more than 1,000 policymakers, business leaders, and interest groups gather for the first-ever global AI summit on Africa. The two-day event starting on Thursday in Kigali, where President Paul Kagame is scheduled to speak, follows ambitious plans to make AI applications mainstream in Africa.
Last week Cassava Technologies, a group owned by the Zimbabwean billionaire and summit co-chair Strive Masiyiwa, announced plans to build an AI factory in South Africa by June, using chips from the US manufacturer Nvidia. In December, Chinese telecoms giant Huawei launched its cloud services in Nigeria powered by multiple high-level data centers.
Underpinning this private sector push is a wave of African governments designing policies to court long-term investment — especially in cloud and fiber optic networks — and develop local talent. Nigeria and South Africa, two of the continent’s largest economies, have both floated AI policy frameworks in the last 12 months. Rwanda unveiled its guiding document in 2022.
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Africa’s AI demand can be seen in the rise of bank chatbots automating customer service jobs but also in using algorithms to more effectively carry out poverty interventions. The potentially mammoth financial returns of the tech are another driver. But there is also deep curiosity surrounding the ethics of how AI should be deployed to a diverse region of 1 billion people.
An increasing number of research groups are examining the technology’s potential to transform African work and life, and the roles of government policy in realizing the potential. A Google report last year projected that AI could add $30 billion to sub-Saharan Africa’s economy by 2030. A separate estimate expects AI to raise Africa’s annual GDP by 3% to $2.9 trillion by the same year.
Alexander’s View
When Google opened its first AI lab in Ghana in 2019, Africa’s technology conversation was dominated by the emergence of startups promising to disrupt particular aspects of local economies. But rapid progress in cloud computing in the years since and OpenAI’s breakout success have raised the urgency for considering AI’s potentially sweeping effects across the entire region.
Last June, a group of 130 African tech ministers endorsed an AI strategy for the continent, underscoring this key moment. They praised the “tremendous opportunities” that come with AI but also urged the creation of a system that reflects Africa’s “diviversity, languages, culture, history, and geographical contexts.”
Room for Disagreement
Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s least prepared region for developing AI systems, according to an index by the International Monetary Fund, due to lower levels of digital infrastructure, economic integration, labor policies, and ethical frameworks. South Sudan, Central African Republic, and Chad were the lowest-scoring nations globally on the digital infrastructure indicator of the index.
The View From Abuja
Nigeria is hoping to attract big tech companies with vast financial resources to build hyperscale data centers in the country, said Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, head of Nigerian technology agency NITDA. “We are engaging Google and local providers to come and invest in infrastructure, while the government wants to focus on applications,” Abdullahi told Semafor.
“DeepSeek has proven to the world that you don’t need big infrastructure like OpenAI. We can use smaller infrastructure, be innovative and get similar quality.”