AI & African Enterprises: September 2023 Newsletter
Newsletter Originally Published September 25, 2023
⚖️ Nigeria, Kenya Manage Reality of AI
Earlier this month, Bart Nnaji, former Nigerian Minister of Science, stressed the importance of AI as key to Nigeria's "participation in the fourth industrial revolution" in a recent convocation speech. Putting action to words, Nigeria's new ICT Minister, Dr. Bosun Tijani, posted a call for researchers of Nigerian descent to participate in shaping Nigeria's national AI strategy. Interestingly, the crowd-sourcing call is the second phase of a ministry-led project. The first phase involved training machine-learning models to identify researchers of Nigerian descent from published research papers. This seems a decidedly technocratic approach to technology policy, but we look forward to seeing the results of Mr. Tijani's efforts.
Moses Kuria, Kenya's Investments Trade and Industry Cabinet Secretary, announced outsourcing firm Sama, plans to hire 2100 Kenyans to work on computer vision - likely data labelling - as part of government efforts to create 1 million outsourcing jobs. Sama is currently being sued by Kenyan workers hired by the firm to deliver content moderation services to Facebook (Meta).
Conversely, the Kenyan government announced a halt to Sam Altman's (OpenAI) "AI Worldcoin" crypto project where 350,000 Kenyans were paid ~£39 in Worldcoin tokens in exchange for having their iris scanned. Worldcoin's activities were paused while the government investigates "data privacy and security concerns."
Takeaway: As African governments manage the impact of AI in African contexts, we will see a variety of approaches that are, in turns, pragmatic, technocractic and even (rightly) protectionist, as policy makers and regulators manage the reality of AI.
—Team ajala