AI & African Enterprises: April 2024 Newsletter
Newsletter originally published May 6, 2024
🎠Much Ado About Something (National AI Strategies)
There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen. In the context of AI in Africa, April was a decade-long month, with much ado around leading African economies' National AI Strategies.
Kenya
Kenya's government announced a partnership at a stakeholder meeting this month with Germany's GIZ to develop a National AI Stratetgy. Discussions centred licensing requirements, regulatory oversight, data collection, infrastrure, R&D, and projected contributions to grow Kenya's economy. Kenya, alongside Cote d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Equitorial Guinea, Liberia, Morocco, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Zambia, also co-sponsored UN Resolution A/78/L.49 to establish a framework to develop trustworthy AI systems for sustainable development.
Nigeria
Nigeria's ICT minister, Dr. Bosun Tijani, led an AI workshop where he announced plans for Nigeria's National AI strategy for which $3.5M in seed funding has been secured from external stakeholders. Proposed plans include 4 components:
Launched the Nigeria AI Collective, a community aimed at advancing Nigeria's AI ecosystem
Acquisition of GPUs to establish federally administered compute resources for AI research
Plans to develop an LLM that supports 3 Nigerian languages, and
Relaunched Nigeria's National Center for AI and Robotics
South Africa
In October 2023, South Africa's Department of Communications & Digital Technologies published a draft National AI Plan. While the draft plan addresses the impact of AI on Education, Regulatory concerns, Infrastructure, and Investment, the plan has been criticized for a lack of coherence with National Data and Cloud policies.
Our Thoughts
Compared to Kenya, whose National AI Strategy defines top-down plans to contribute to growing Kenya's economy, Nigeria and South Africa's plans seem lacking
South Africa's draft plans, while addressing strategic concerns of national interest, seem to require further stakeholder dialogue to achieve coherence
Nigeria's plans, while specific, are curiously tactical in that they are mostly replicating work done by Nigeria's existing Language Technology startups, and don't seem to focus on top-down, national concerns
We note, Kenya secured $100M investment from UAE's G42 to build a green data centre to power AI compute using Kenya's hydropower resources. This is an example of how AI strategy can secure investments and deliver broad economic gains.
Takeaway: As African governments define and refine their National AI Strategies, success will likely hinge on positioning for a future where AI is a dominant technology across all spheres of life and industry