Daya Reddy Professor Emeritus, University of Cape Town, South Africa Member, Pontifical Academy of Sciences

1.    The digital revolution

The digital revolution has been one of rapid technological change, particularly during the first quarter of this century. Its impact has been immediate and transformational, and has been experienced across the broadest social and economic landscapes.

The most recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in generative AI, in a short period represent perhaps the most dramatic phase to date of the digital revolution. AI has had a huge impact. In the educational sphere, to take a specific example, it has yielded unprecedented educational opportunities, including personalised learning and support, improvements in the effectiveness of course content, and teacher support.

At the same time the advent of AI has been accompanied by a multitude of ethical, social, and epistemic challenges.

Responses to these developments have been uneven, depending to a great extent on educational and technical preparedness, as well as on access to relevant resources. Africa is a case in point. On the one hand the continent has experienced rapid growth in internet access, and has seen pioneering digital developments such as mobile money platforms, which have achieved high levels of acceptance and use, replacing conventional payment methods. Conditions for full participation in the digital transformation are however not equitable, nor are they inclusive.

In this piece we examine Africa’s response to AI; the conditions that would be conducive to the continent’s embracing the opportunities that AI presents as an engine for social and economic development; and the circumstances under which the youth of Africa, equipped with digital and more particularly AI expertise, would be at the vanguard of ‘leapfrogging’ current technologies and approaches in accelerating development.

2.    Africa today

Africa is the world’s youngest continent, in the sense that 60% of its population are under the age of 25. It is projected that, by 2035, there will be more young Africans entering the workforce each year than the rest of the world combined (Mpemba and Munyati, 2023).

This situation is viewed by many with optimism, the view being that Africa’s “youth tsunami” is well placed to take centre stage in driving progress on the continent. Indeed, the African Union’s Agenda 2063 presents a blueprint for a development agenda that is youth-led.

Nevertheless, several significant challenges confront the continent.

Comprehensive access to high quality education is a sine qua non for youth to play the role expected of it. There are however significant barriers to progress in the education sector. In 2020, 29% of school-age children in Sub-Saharan Africa were not being educated, albeit a decrease from 44% in 2000 (UNESCO, 2022). Enrolment numbers across the different regions and countries show much unevenness with regard to numbers attending school, and the quality of education provided. So, not only is the challenge one of comprehensively accessible education at all levels, starting with early childhood, but furthermore, one of ensuring a strong foundation of basic skills in education programmes, and of building into programmes those elements and skills that are necessary in the digital, high-tech world.

Infrastructural challenges abound. For example, around 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are living without electricity, accounting for more than 80% of the global population without access (WHO, 2024).

Nevertheless, improvements in telecommunication infrastructure and rapid adoption of mobile devices have led to a boost in internet access in Africa: the continent had around 570 million internet users in 2022,[1] a number that more than doubled compared to 2015. Of these, some 100 million users are in Nigeria. The continent has however yet to achieve its full digital potential: despite the rising number of users, the internet penetration rate stood at around 43 percent in 2021, below a global average of 66 percent (Statista, 2024).

Despite a number of encouraging signs of progress, digital inequality across the continent remains significant. Only 5% of children and young people aged 25 or younger in West and Central Africa, and just 13% in Eastern and Southern Africa, have internet access at home (UNICEF, 2020).

3.    Africa must not be left behind

The question is: what to do to ensure that Africa is not left behind, is not in the position of having to play catch-up, is a partner or participant in the development of AI rather than a consumer and provider of cheap labour (for data labelling, for instance)? The importance of a constructive response to this question is a substantial pay-off: of an Africa in which there is wide and deep understanding of and experience in the use of AI, which is used to address in unprecedented ways and with unprecedented effectiveness the major challenges facing the continent, such as poverty, food security, inequality, and the consequences of anthropogenic climate change.

The goal then is one of bridging the digital divide so that Africa, in partnerships within the continent and with others around the world, becomes a full participant, contributor, and effective user of AI in addressing major challenges, and with youth playing a pivotal role.

There are a number of areas that require attention and action, and which are prerequisites to the successful harnessing of AI towards the social good.

Significantly greater investment in education will be a key component of a solid base. Investment would be directed to building capacity in addressing issues around the curriculum, from early childhood to high school to university, ensuring a proper place for solid basic skill sets together with the development of digital literacy; greater numbers of well qualified teachers, with provision for comprehensive in-service professional development programmes; and, given the relatively high numbers of children not attending school, interventions aimed at increasing school enrolments, and at ensuring that children complete their schooling.

Infrastructural targets range from the basic – for example working towards increasing the number of homes with access to electricity – to those essential to the digital world, such as inexpensive access to the internet and computer hardware. These and other needs are resource-heavy, so that public-private partnerships would be central to realising such goals.

With the assumption that steady progress can be made towards meeting these various prerequisites, AI-related goals must begin with the education sector. For AI to be a meaningful tool both students and educators must develop AI literacy, the ability to engage critically with AI, understand its limitations, and use it responsibly. Educational programmes should go beyond basic AI usage and emphasise critical engagement, and equipping students and educators with the ability to question and understand AI’s biases, limitations, and ethical implications.

Resources exist that would guide both teachers and students in working towards these goals; for example, the competency frameworks for teacher and students released by UNESCO. The student framework aims to assist educators in integrating artificial intelligence learning objectives into official school curricula, in this way preparing students to be responsible and creative citizens in the era of AI (UNESCO, 2024a); while the teacher framework guides teachers on AI use and misuse in education, and sets out the knowledge, skills, and values that would need to be mastered by teachers (UNESCO 2024b).

Providing the foundation for young people to learn, and access to personalized learning tools, are going to be of foundational importance.

Returning to infrastructure, the energy-related demands of AI pose significant environmental sustainability challenges. The anticipated rapid growth of AI will significantly increase energy demand, particularly for data centres and cloud computing. It will therefore be vital to give attention to sustainable energy provision in tandem with addressing the range of infrastructural needs of AI.

Cultural factors, and factors related to Africa’s own social and developmental goals, should play a significant role in approaching questions pertaining, for example, to the manner in which AI literacy programmes are developed: there is a need to take cognisance of local educational contexts. Likewise, the reality is that by far the bulk of data is generated from sources in the Global North. It is essential that African entities develop and implement the means to address data and algorithmic bias through initiatives that include the local generation of datasets.

A further, significant, manifestation of inequality as it pertains to Africa and AI concerns the sidelining of African languages, in many of which current systems are not optimized to generate text, thus constituting an additional barrier to access. Organisations such as Masakhane (https://www.masakhane.io) are directing considerable energy and expertise towards building language capabilities in African indigenous languages and dialects.

A one-size-fits all approach to AI adoption is not feasible, given inequalities in relation to access to smart devices, internet access and affordable data rates. Thus, AI may exacerbate discrimination against marginalised groups. However, AI could also be a mechanism that can contribute to addressing such inequalities.

Adams (2024) has written persuasively on growing and ubiquitous inequality as the single biggest threat to the transformative promise of AI.

The use of AI poses potential risks. With regard to children for example, these include exposure to inappropriate content and false information, social media addictions, and lack of control (Research ICT Africa, 2024). Furthermore, potential bias against marginalised groups that causes systems to treat those in different socioeconomic or ethnic groups differently.

It is therefore important to establish clear frameworks for responsible AI use, safeguarding the data privacy of young people and ensuring that AI tools do not perpetuate biases or inequalities. There exist important UN mechanisms such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which monitors implementation of Convention by its States parties. The Convention affirms the right of every child to be respected, protected and fulfilled in digital environments.

Current AI policies and legal frameworks in AI do not provide sufficient mechanisms to protect children’s data privacy, nor do they provide transparency and accountability for children online. There is often little oversight or regulation to ensure that the systems used are safe, ethical, and beneficial for the children involved (Research ICT Africa, 2024).

The need for and urgency of stronger regulatory frameworks to safeguard children online has seen action on the African continent, for example with the African Union’s Child Online Safety and Empowerment Policy. The policy assesses the opportunities and risks related to digital access for children and the factors influencing child online safety, sets out the key cross-cutting issues to uphold children’s rights in the digital environment and identifies ten related policy goals.

4.    Bridging the digital divide – existing efforts

While the picture presented may be one of an Africa in which the adoption of AI is at best at an embryonic stage, it is worth noting many existing efforts aimed at the development of AI skills, as well as entrepreneurial AI-related activities.

Over 2,400 companies in Africa specialise in AI, with 41% being startups. And approximately $2.02 billion has been invested in promoting AI activities on the continent (Afrilabs, 2024). Some examples of start-up activity include the employment of drone imagery and AI to enable early pest and disease detection (Dronelife, 2025); and the use of AI with text messaging to deliver personalised, accessible education to primary school students across Africa (ACTS, 2024).

Efforts to equip African youth with relevant digital skills include the EDISON Alliance, which aims to improve one billion lives through affordable and accessible digital solutions to challenges in health, finance, and education by 2025.

Other laudable AI-related initiatives include the Deep Learning Indaba, an annual meeting of the African machine learning and AI community. The Indaba is an educational charity whose mission is to strengthen AI in Africa, and to ensure African ownership of AI advances on the continent. The 2024 Indaba had over 600 participants from across Africa and beyond.

The AU Youth Envoy, in partnership with Google and regional governments, has led a major digital skills campaign aimed at equipping 100 000 young people with digital skills by 2024.

As a final example of infrastructure investment, Cassava Technologies, a global technology leader of African heritage, is committing more than $700 million in a partnership with Nvidia, which controls more than 90% of the graphical processing unit (GPU) market globally, to build Africa’s first “AI factory”, with many thousands of GPUs forming the engines of data centres to be installed across Africa.[2]

5.    A return to the matter of youth and AI[3]

We return to the question: to what extent are Africa’s youth in a position to play a leapfrogging role, bypassing outdated systems and processes, embracing AI and exploiting it to lead the charge towards achieving developmental goals? How might Africa’s demographic potential be unlocked? The youth dividend is a tantalizing and appealing notion: one of the continent’s young people playing a vanguard role in harnessing the potential of AI so that it becomes a catalyst to driving innovation across agriculture, healthcare, education, and other key sectors.

It is clear that such a payoff is not feasible without a number of pre-and co-requisites being addressed. The various prerequisites have been identified in an earlier section: these would ensure that the youth are equipped, educationally and otherwise, to seize the opportunities presented by digital and more particularly AI advances; that significant investment in education ensures a critical mass of well qualified young people; and that the essential infrastructure and related technical support, are in place.

Enabling actions would be central to generating momentum and achieving these goals. These actions would include policies and regulatory frameworks that actively promote youth-led innovation, with accompanying investments and budgetary provision. The success of such interventions will depend critically on the extent to which youth are full participants in developing the vision and formulating policy. Indeed, the success of an AI-centred strategy that is youth-led will depend in turn on the policy and other provisions that will allow the youth to exercise their agency, the better to seize the opportunities before them.

Such interventions will be highly capital-intensive, so that public-private partnerships as well as equitable partnerships with state and other entities beyond Africa would be central to achieving these goals, with strategies that include targeted investments and economic incentives. Ownership should be well defined, with local generation, collection and ownership of data, being key.

Rather than each country seeking to go it alone, a strategy based on shared resources in a distributed network of data centres, computer nodes, and training and research facilities, together with shared data, will render more viable access to cutting-edge infrastructure and training, and at the same time promote a beneficial culture of cooperation and mutual support, in the spirit of open scholarship and open science. The African Open Science Platform is an excellent example of such an African networked and cooperative structure. The Platform aims to position African scientists at the cutting edge of data intensive science by stimulating interactivity and creating opportunity, inter alia by building critical mass through shared capacities.[4]

By acting strategically, with purpose, and with the huge asset of Africa’s youth and its potential in mind, African policymakers by acting decisively can create the conditions for the continent’s youth to lead the way towards a more prosperous continent.

Acknowledgement

The author has benefited from communication with Carlos Lopes on this topic, and acknowledges the shared insights with thanks. The author also acknowledges with thanks comments by Jonathan Shock, which have led to the inclusion of further relevant and important material in this work.

References

ACTS, 2024. African Centre for Technology Studies, Application of AI in Education, Nairobi, Kenya. Available at https://ai4d.acts-net.org/wp-content/uploads/application-of-an-AI-education-in-Africa.pdf

Adams, R. 2024. The new empire of AI: the future of global inequality. Wiley.

Afrilabs (2024). Mapping AI start-ups in Africa. Available at https://www.afrilabs.com/ecosystem-insights

Dronelife (2025). https://dronelife.com/2025/03/18/ai-drones-and-the-future-of-farming-a-game-changer-for-plant-disease-detection-and-food-security/

Lopes, C. (2012). Statement at the International Conference on Youth and Democratization in Africa, UN Economic Commission for Africa, 2012: available at https://repository.uneca.org/handle/10855/46808

Mpemba, C. and Munyati, C. (2023). World Economic Forum, How Africa’s youth will drive global growth. Available at https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/08/africa-youth-global-growth-digital-economy/

Ramaite, A.F. (2024). Can AI unlock Africa’s youth demographic opportunities? ISS African Futures, available at https://futures.issafrica.org/blog/2024/Can-AI-unlock-Africas-youth-demographic-opportunities-

Research ICT Africa, 2024). Z Schroeder, D Nyakundi, J Fuller and L Dwolatzky, Children of the Digital Age: Exploring the Potential impacts of AI on Africa’s Children, Cape Town. Available at https://researchictafrica.net/research/exploring-the-potential-impacts-of-ai-on-africas-children/

Statista, 2024. Internet usage in Africa – statistics & facts. Available at https://www.statista.com/topics/9813/internet-usage-in-africa/#topicOverview

UNESCO, 2022. Global Education Monitoring Report: Policy Paper, 2022; available at https://www.unesco.org/gem-report/en/2022-out-school

UNESCO 2024a. AI student competency framework 2024: Available at https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/ai-competency-framework-students

UNESCO 2024b. AI teacher competency framework 2024: Available at https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/ai-competency-framework-teachers

UNICEF, 2020. How many children and young people have internet access at home? Available at https://www.unicef.org/media/88381/file/how-many-children-and-young-people-have-internet-access-at-home-2020.pdf

World Health Organization, 2024. Tracking SDG 7: The energy progress report. Available at https://trackingsdg7.esmap.org/downloads

[1] https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1146636/internet-users-in-africa

[2] See https://techcentral.co.za/cassava-african-ai-factory-720-million/261991/

[3] This section draws on (Ramaite, 2014) and (Lopes, 2012).

[4] See https://council.science/news/the-national-research-foundation-of-south-africa-to-host-the-african-open-science-platform/