Are governments in sub-Saharan Africa ready for AI?
Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest average score of any region, highlighting challenges to government AI adoption.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its presence known, and even in its infancy, it is already proving to be a profoundly disruptive technology. Much like how the internet revolutionised communication, information access, and business operations, AI is poised to have an even greater impact on our lives. The powerful technology is already streamlining processes through automation, analysing vast amounts of data much faster and more accurately, and improving decision-making through predictive analytics. It’s even being used to speed up new inventions and discoveries. But is sub-Saharan Africa ready for this game-changing tech? According to a recent report, the answer is not quite.
But what does it mean to be AI ready? AI readiness refers to the preparedness, capacity, and ability to overcome challenges and maximise the value generated through AI adoption, in addition to having the right tech, infrastructure, and skills. Oxford Insights released the 2023 edition of the Government AI Readiness Index, an annual report providing valuable insights at the intersection of government and AI, assessing the AI readiness of 193 governments worldwide.
Unfortunately, sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest average score of any region, highlighting challenges to government AI adoption.
The index is meant to show how ready a given government is to implement AI in delivering public services to its citizens. For this, three pillars were considered:
- Government: having a strategic vision for how it develops and governs AI, appropriate regulation, and attention to ethical risks (governance and ethics);
- The technology sector: offering good supply of AI tools, having high innovation capacity, underpinned by a business environment that supports entrepreneurship;
- Data and infrastructure: since AI tools need high-quality data to avoid bias and error and represent the citizens.
According to Shikoli Makatiani, director of Serianu Kenya Ltd, a cyber security firm: “African governments need to realise that it is no longer [just] an issue of collecting data; it is now a question of [whether] you have the hardware to use that data to train your models, and how you ensure that after you train these models, you can serve them for inference.”
But it’s not all doom and gloom. The report also highlights some positive developments. Over the past year, three countries have published new national AI strategies, and one has announced a forthcoming strategy. Rwanda was the first country within the low-income bracket to publish an AI strategy, while Senegal and Benin also joined the ranks in 2023. Ethiopia is said to be finalising its own strategy and Nigeria has reported working on a draft. Elsewhere, Mauritius has had an AI strategy for 5 years and leads the region with a score of 53.27. It is followed by South Africa (47.27), Rwanda (45.38), Senegal (42.58) and Benin (41.37) in the top five.
The five lowest-ranking countries in the region are DR Congo, Burundi, Central African Republic, Eritrea and South Sudan.
“Governments do need to lead the way in AI adoption and create an enabling environment for non-state actors in the private sector and civil societies for the benefit of the citizens,” says Eric Wamugu, senior programme manager at Code for Africa’s (CfA) DataLab.
One such pressing challenge is that of building adequate data and infrastructure — a foundation without which AI cannot evolve. This is where organisations like CfA come into play, enabling access to critical datasets through platforms like openAFRICA. The largest independent volunteer-driven open data repository, openAFRICA is available as a free resource and empowers citizens, civil society, media, and government agencies with open access to data, enabling informed decision-making and fostering transparency and civic engagement. Such initiatives go a long way in bridging the data availability gap that hinders AI development in sub-Saharan Africa.
Additionally, CfA is already demonstrating how the technology can be used to forge safer online communities. One such tool is FeedShield which leverages AI to document online harassment, especially targeting women journalists and public figures in Africa. Built on Jigsaw’s open source Harassment Manager toolkit, FeedShield also enables users to unfollow, mute and block toxic content.
Seizing the AI potential
In the African context, it is crucial to consider the impact of AI on data collection, exploitation, protection, and privacy. One development in this regard is the publication and approval of the African Union’s AI Continental Strategy for Africa. This strategy seeks to address concerns about job losses and create new opportunities by integrating AI across various industries.
However, AI is only as good as the data it feeds from. For a successful AI incorporation in Africa, we need sufficient African data captured, protected, and used. One way is to have data in formats that innovators can exploit which will be helped by a data governance framework that makes data more open and respects the fundamental rights of citizens.
Moctar Yedaly, Special Envoy for the Global Conference on Cybersecurity Capacity Building (GC3B), and former minister for innovation and ICT in Mauritania observes: “Every country in Africa has enough data. We do not have the luxury in this digital era to act as one individual country; instead, we must act collectively, which will strengthen us in terms of volume and data generation. Africa should approve a single data policy and implement it across countries — one data policy for all.”
Africa should be aware of the wave, but it should take the time to interrogate what is needed in this era and what opportunities AI brings. Ensuring connectivity to everyone should be a top priority. We should then try to understand what AI is, and have the right regulations in place. Once this is clear, governments should prioritise capacity building for skills development, leveraging the local context to train their own models.
Want to learn more about AI readiness? Find the data here.
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of civic technology and data journalism labs, with teams in 21 countries. CfA builds digital democracy solutions that give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions and strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability. This includes building infrastructure like the continent’s largest open data portals at openAFRICA and sourceAFRICA. CfA incubates initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative, the sensors.AFRICA air quality sensor network, and the research and analysis programme CivicSignal.
CfA also manages the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), which provides the continent’s best muckraking newsrooms with the newest possible forensic data tools, digital security, and whistleblower encryption to help to improve their ability to tackle crooked politicians, organised crime, and predatory big business. CfA also runs one of Africa’s largest skills development initiatives for digital journalists, and seed funds cross-border collaboration.
