Increasingly, both public and private conversations across the continent are centred on Africa’s AI posture.
While the technology promises to transform industries ranging from finance and healthcare to agriculture and education, the debate in Africa is not merely about how quickly AI will arrive. It is about whether African countries possess the foundations necessary to benefit from it.
That urgency is reflected in the growing number of national AI strategies emerging across the continent.
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The African Union adopted its Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy in 2024, while a growing number of African countries have released national frameworks outlining how they intend to govern and deploy the technology. The challenge, however, is that strategy documents are often easier to produce than the conditions required to make them succeed.
For Fola Adeleke, Executive Director at the Global Center on AI Governance, the starting point for any meaningful discussion about AI policy in Africa is neither regulation nor technology. It is jobs.
The jobs question must come first
Africa is the youngest continent in the world, with roughly 60% of its population under the age of 25.
At the same time, governments face a persistent challenge in creating enough employment opportunities for a rapidly expanding workforce. While millions of young Africans enter the labour market every year, formal job creation continues to lag behind demand.
That challenge is particularly important because many of the sectors expected to absorb young workers over the coming decades are also among those most likely to be reshaped by AI. Customer support, administrative services, bookkeeping, software development, data processing, and a growing range of professional services are already being transformed by AI systems.
Adeleke rejects the idea that the answer lies in slowing down adoption or treating AI primarily as a threat. Instead, he argues that policymakers should focus on three interconnected areas: skills development, startup growth, and infrastructure.
Skills-development policies cannot simply replicate the digital-literacy programmes that have become commonplace across the continent. The objective should be to prepare young Africans for an economy where AI becomes a routine part of work rather than a specialised tool used by a handful of companies.
The second component is startup development. As governments attempt to build domestic AI ecosystems, they will need to think beyond headline-grabbing announcements and consider the practical barriers that prevent local companies from competing.
That means improving access to affordable compute, reducing the cost of cloud infrastructure, expanding access to capital, and designing incentives that encourage experimentation and innovation.
The African Union’s Continental AI Strategy points in a similar direction, emphasising talent development, infrastructure, innovation ecosystems, and African-owned solutions.
AI policy is industrial policy
It is the third component — infrastructure — that Adeleke believes deserves the greatest attention.
“An AI policy should be an industrial policy, and you can’t separate both,” he says. “You can’t be talking about the adoption of AI without dealing with existing infrastructure problems like power, connectivity, and water access.”
The continent’s experience with previous technological revolutions has created a powerful belief in leapfrogging.
Mobile phones allowed many countries to bypass fixed-line telecommunications infrastructure. Mobile money expanded financial inclusion in places where traditional banking networks remained underdeveloped. Digital platforms have similarly created new markets despite weaknesses in physical infrastructure.
AI, however, presents a different challenge because the technology depends far more heavily on physical and digital infrastructure than previous waves of innovation.
Reliable electricity powers data centres and cloud infrastructure. Broadband networks enable access to AI services. Universities and research institutions produce technical talent. Industrial policy determines whether companies can access the capital and infrastructure needed to scale.
Without those foundations, ambitions to build the next OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepSeek from Africa will remain aspirational.
Even beyond frontier AI development, the continent’s infrastructure deficit presents immediate constraints. Nearly half of Africa’s population still lacks access to electricity, while digital connectivity remains uneven across countries and between urban and rural areas.
Recent World Bank research similarly argues that developing economies hoping to benefit from AI must first address gaps in power, connectivity, skills, and institutional capacity. If industrial policy determines whether AI ecosystems can emerge, governance determines the rules under which they operate.
So far, much of the movement around AI governance in Africa has come from executive branches of government through national strategies and policy frameworks. Adeleke argues that legislatures must also become more involved, but not necessarily in the way many people assume.
“Lawmakers should be thinking beyond the adoption of a new law and more around the sufficiency of existing laws.”
The point is not that new AI legislation is unnecessary. Rather, it is that governments should first determine whether existing legal frameworks are capable of addressing many of the challenges AI creates.
Sovereignty, safeguards, and Africa’s AI future
Across Africa, AI-related disputes are already touching areas governed by long-standing legal regimes.
Intellectual-property laws shape debates over training AI models on copyrighted content. Competition laws determine how governments respond to dominant technology platforms. Access-to-information frameworks influence how public institutions deploy automated systems.
The pressure on those frameworks is already becoming visible. In July, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu directed the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) to investigate allegations of anti-competitive conduct and the unauthorised use of news content by major technology companies after concerns were raised by media organisations.
Similar disputes have emerged globally, with publishers, musicians, photographers, and creative industries questioning how AI systems are trained and monetised.
In South Africa, the country’s Competition Commission has taken an increasingly active approach towards digital-platform regulation, demonstrating how existing institutions can shape the behaviour of global technology companies without waiting for entirely new AI-specific legislation.
For Adeleke, that points to a broader lesson. Legislators should focus not only on passing laws but also on ensuring that existing agencies possess the authority and re capacity may pose a greater risk than gaps in legislation
If policymakers must prioritise, Adeleke proposes a relatively simple hierarchy with people-centred development as its starting point.
Regardless of how sophisticated the technology becomes, he argues that AI policy should ultimately be judged by whether it improves the wellbeing of citizens, promotes inclusive development, and addresses challenges that have historically constrained economic growth across the continent.
That emphasis is particularly important because Africa enters the AI era from a position of uneven re
Funding for AI development remains concentrated in a small number of countries, including South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt. Even within those markets, investment tends to flow disproportionately towards a limited number of companies and sectors.
For many governments, ambitions around AI will therefore collide with fiscal constraints and competing development priorities.
There is also a geopolitical dimension to the challenge. As global competition around AI intensifies, African countries risk becoming consumers of technologies designed elsewhere rather than participants in shaping them.
Yet Adeleke argues that the use of foreign-developed technology is not inherently problematic. African countries have long relied on imported technologies across telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare, and finance.
The more important question is whether governments possess the institutional strength necessary to govern those technologies effectively.
“Adoption of foreign technology and its usage in Africa is less of a problem if we have the right safeguards in terms of institutions enforcing existing laws,” he notes.
Without those safeguards, countries risk becoming testing grounds for poorly understood technologies introduced in pursuit of investment or geopolitical influence. With them, foreign technology can still generate significant economic and social benefits while operating within locally determined rules.
Ultimately, the debate around AI in Africa cannot be reduced to just algorithms, regulation, or strategy documents.
Instead, the continent’s ability to benefit from AI will depend on questions that are far older than the technology itself: whether governments can provide reliable infrastructure, create economic opportunities, strengthen institutions, and invest in human capital.
