As artificial intelligence transforms global systems, Africa remains sidelined in its design; even as its labour and resources power the very infrastructure that makes AI possible.

In today’s digital age, history-making lightbulb moments don’t always strike in boardrooms or after soul-searching mountain hikes. Sometimes, they unfold casually on the X timeline.

With AI proponents promising to ‘save’ Africa, Nanjala Nyabola asks an urgent question: what happens when a continent’s future is outsourced to someone else’s imagination?

‘Mariam doesn’t know whether Dina’s a virgin, but if she were in her place, she now thinks—under the threat of her family finding out that she wasn’t—she would say she had been raped. To them, that would be better than knowing she had sinned willingly.

The growth of generative AI has led to debates about its acceptability in art and whether artists are being conservative for rejecting its use.

Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami, is fascinated by the extractive power of technology: ‘Techno-capitalism has infiltrated our lives to such an extent that our only real break from it comes when we sleep.

In a country failed by peace agreements, connection didn’t disappear—it went online. South Sudan’s digital diaspora challenges the glossy myths of Silicon Valley and insists that innovation thrives not only in wealth and infrastructure, but in resilience, memory, and connection across borders.

From his mother’s community chemist shop in Enugu to a Toronto lab, Nigerian pharmacist Chukwunonso Nwabufo is building a device that could save lives by revealing how your genes respond to drugs, but his real revolution may be redefining what is ‘rare’ in medical research.

AI is opening the door to health systems that can learn, adapt and act. Can Africa harness it to leap ahead?