According to the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration, artificial intelligence is ‘any artificial system that performs tasks under varying and unpredictable circumstances without significant human oversight, or that can learn from experience and improve performance when exposed to data sets.’
From this, we can deduce that artificial intelligence is not just the 21st century hubbub of highly proficient chatbots that generate type-written and visual feedback, but also typical of all the other examples of systems that are automated with specific engineering. Historically, AI never predated major innovative concerns until the early 2000s, when machine learning was applied to a wide range of problems. This has subsequently led to its boom since 2020, with models like ChatGPT and other generative AI. Presently, artificial intelligence simultaneously presents challenges to modern technological innovation and offers potent solutions for global technological problems. Given its immense possibilities, it has the promise to be both the thesis and antithesis of humankind. However, from an African perspective, the many possibilities of AI raise major concerns.
When by 2025, according to statistics, Africa has become a quarter of the world's population, are we going to have a quarter people who are dependent on foreign technological ecosystems, or are we capable of making provisions that can cater to the needs of a quarter people? Africa is presently dominated by other parts of the world in major aspects of the growth sector. Not only is this ironic, given the number of human labour, intelligence and resources that Africa has produced and is producing, but it also highlights Africa’s deficiency at sustainability.
Why does Africa need AI? Is it truly necessary for its growth?
THE WAKANDA VISION
In Ryan Coogler's 2018 film Black Panther, which takes its place as an African inclusion in the Marvel Universe, we are introduced to the utopian community of Wakanda, where automated tech-powered weaponry and a futuristic brand of artificial intelligence, all milked from a meteorite worth of natural resource called ‘vibranium’, are utilized by an African civilization. While Black Panther may have done a poor job on the representation level, it creates an image of Africa which has begun using its resources for development. This is an important reference to provide an extensive analysis on why Africa needs artificial intelligence and how it can be used to ensure the continent’s growth. When will the natural resources of Africa, buried beneath its subterranean thresholds, be used to develop Africa? Not only does the continent have these resources, but also enough to innovate and improve on the technological levels of different sectors. Black Panther shows the possibilities of integrating artificial intelligence into sectors such as fintech, agritech and healthtech to ensure the quality of life in Africa.
Equally, in an extensive study titled ‘AI and the Future of Work in Africa (White Paper)’, which is the output of a multidisciplinary workshop held in Nairobi in November 2023, there is intensive insight into the future of AI in Africa. Being a product of an eclectic symposium that brought together several thought-leaders from various sectors to discuss the implications of generative AI for the future of Africa, the study bordered around four key themes: macroeconomic impacts; jobs, skills and labour market; workers’ perspectives; and Afro-centric platforms.
According to the study, there is the essentialism of cultivating young African talent in AI research and innovation, as well as policy and governance. In the West, young people have access to information and learning opportunities to ground their curiosity in current technological trends; millions are dedicated towards research and scientific inquiry, little wonder that most of the references of modern innovations lead back to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In some Nigerian universities, science students still study under a very outdated curriculum, some write programming exams with pens and papers, while others do not have enough material to carry out projects. When a Nigerian child is characterized by having a natural flair for engineering, like the examples of children on social media making low-budget tech devices, the ultimate directive is to either have them emigrate to these foreign countries where they finally get to anchor the rest of their lives, or to surrender to the available national system that does not provide enough individual support. This is an acute example of geographical inequality in access to tech opportunities, and it poses an imminent threat to the future of Africa and its citizens.
Artificial intelligence also promises to improve Africa’s fintech and agritech industries. Generative AI could centre on African perspectives and indigenous speech models to tailor solutions to the needs of the masses. In many Nigerian banks for instance, customer service is an issue, with either the staff being unable to attend to their overwhelming customers, or to able to communicate with them properly due to language barrier. It is not enough to have an intuitive interactive software like Leo of the United Bank for Africa (UBA), when some of its users can't properly utilize it.
There can be audio options for this kind of software that can interact with customers and offer solutions based on accurate technical simulation. Farmers could leverage AI to check weather conditions, optimize planting schedules and to develop better agricultural analysis. We cannot achieve this level of knowledge if the opportunities that AI can offer are not properly harnessed by stakeholders of the society included in our education—which brings us to the final and most critical consideration for an AI-powered future: how can we decolonize AI?
DECOLONIZING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The possibility of AI being a major utility in harnessing an African future is impaired by the dangers of data colonialism and dependence. Countries like China are creating AI platforms that are not only top-notch but also constructed within their national core. While a pretentious ideology would prescribe that AI should be harnessed for the universal good, it is evident that companies like Tesla and the Chinese DeepSeek, are algorithmically designed with national priorities in mind. For Africa, if artificial intelligence should not just be a far-fetched dream, then it is necessary that the AI we integrate be free from colonial thinking. This may pose as contradictory considering that a major part of the African existence is freighted with western influences, it is however more important that these influences are reconstructed to models that serve indigenous African purposes first. Like the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene opined, ‘Europe is not [our] centre.’ This can be used to foreground how we must forge a technological centre for our African needs.
One necessary example is Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi’s Paystack, a major start-up created in 2015 which not only catered to the problems of online payment complexities in Nigeria but also inspired other innovations. These innovations like Opay and other artificially intelligent banking systems have helped to curb the financial inconveniences of the Nigerian hard currency and banking transactions.
Paystack was subsequently acquired by Stripes, an American company, for the sum of $200 million. One may think that for a software application that provides such benefits for Nigeria and Africa, the Nigerian government would have provided more support as well as encouraged its adoption by citizens of the country. If the most efficient reward for any African innovation is through a back-end affiliation with foreign companies and platforms, then African AI infrastructures are doomed to surrender their indigeneity for a global appeal. In the age of AI, Africa is prone to neocolonial dependence, and we can only be salvaged when we are able to create AI solutions for Africa’s problems using Africa’s resources. For it is an even greater anomaly, as Fanon would agree, to keep searching for the African revolution, with nothing else but the distant, flickering lights of colonial agencies⎈
*Chimeze Umeoka emerged in fourth place in the 2025 edition of The Republic Student Writing Competition, in partnership with the Open Society Foundation.
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