Mr Viral
“Africa has a unique opportunity to define its own AI destiny,” said Safaricom’s Chief Enterprise Business, Cynthia Kropac, while speaking at the Connected Africa Summit, held in Diani, Kwale County.
Kropac said Africa’s AI future starts with building the right foundation and getting the basics right with Safaricom investing over $500 million into AI infrastructure.
“So while the world debates AI’s impact, Africa represents about 17% of the world’s economy, with 75% of our population below the age of 25,” she said. “By 2050 our continent will represent 25% of the world’s population, growing at a staggering rate of 12 of the 120,000 babies born a day.”
According to Kropac, Africa is a productive continent, leading the world in growth and opportunity and African children are born as digital natives. It’s how they interact with each other, it is how they learn it’s how they build their online personas and their businesses.
However, broadband connectivity reaches only 40% of Africa’s population.
Across the continent, over 400 million Africans remain disconnected from the digital world and companies, private sector companies such as Safaricom, should continue to build connectivity and infrastructure as the basic underpinning for any technology growth.
Safaricom connects over 46 million Kenyans and over 8 million Ethiopians. It has invested in over 6500 towers and over 15,000 kilometers of fiber to bring affordable internet connectivity to all.
“That’s just the rails of how you get access. We must also have affordable devices,” she added. “In partnership with the government of Kenya and with other mobile network operators. We launched the East Africa device assembly of Kenya EDAC, where we are now assembling more than 1.5 million 4G devices a year that are less than $50.”
The devices will help accelerates access to digital services for both home use as well as business. But Safaricom called for more investment and collaboration to connect the over 400 million in Africa to the internet.
This is not just talk for Safaricom as the firm is investing millions of dollars into AI developments across East Africa.
“Safaricom is investing nearly $500 million over the next three years in AI infrastructure across East Africa,” she added. “We’ve already trained over 5000 employees in AI fundamentals. Because the intelligent economy is not just coming to Africa. We are building it. We are here to build Africa’s intelligent economy.”
Broadband expansion is critical to enable trade, fintech, education and AI innovation. Africa’s growing population needs education, healthcare and employment. Therefore accelerating broadband access then becomes an urgent priority.
“To unlock Africa’s potential, we must connect our nations through digital seamless digital infrastructure, removing outdated barriers that slow progress, harmonize policy across borders and to foster a unified digital economy,” she said.
Africa has 1 doctor per 10,000 citizens, far behind the ratio in the developed nations. To meet this demand, Africa must train 10 times more doctors in the next 10 years and 100 times more health practitioners to close the nearly 6.1 million healthcare worker gap that it has.
Meanwhile, food security is a rising challenge. 20% of Africans face hunger, while rising costs make a healthy diet unaffordable for nearly 1 billion people. Investment in education, health care and improved infrastructure is essential to ensure sustainable future.
“AI can help accelerate this transformation,” said Kropac. “It can help transform healthcare access, offer affordable diagnostics, remote consultations, predictive health models in agriculture, help farmers with more precision farming, optimizing their yields and adapting to Climate change.”
According to her, AI is not just about technological advancement but also an economic force. Africa has the potential to add $1.2 trillion to its GDP over the next five years, just by automation and enhancement of healthcare, optimizing of food production and delivering productivity.
However, AI is fueled by data, and Kropac urged Africa to strengthen its data infrastructure. In addition to expanding broadband, it must also cultivate AI expertise.
“Despite having 17% of the global population, we are contributing to less than 1% of the world’s data center capacity. High energy costs, unreliable power, regulatory hurdles slows progress. Over the next 10 years, we will require more than 100 new data centers.”
For energy, Africa is fortunate enough to have abundance of renewable energy which is a competitive advantage.
Solar and hydro powered data centers can cut costs by more than 40% making Africa’s adopt AI adoption much more sustainable. Expanding connectivity through fiber, satellite and local data centers will reduce the reliance on foreign cloud services, secure sovereign data and cut operational costs.
Africa generates unique data sets. It has over 2000 languages but to date, AI models struggle with Africa’s linguistic diversity and low resource. AI models often fail to serve all Africans due to limited training on these local data sets. Africa must build critical data sharing fluency through informed consent, transparency of use, regulation and compliance, which unlocks the power of cross border digital identity. These allows Africans to traverse the continent without friction.
“AI’s infrastructure is not limited to hardware and networks and data centers,” she said. “It’s also about human skill, human culture, our African culture, values and ethics. These are vital for creating systems that serve African societies. Africa needs over 1 million AI professionals, but today, we have less than 50,000.
African universities ought to establish AI labs with industry partnerships and a real world focus with rapid skills, develop programs and diaspora engagement, to ensure that AI reflects realities and values of the continent.
“We must harmonize our data and digital laws across the continent to have a robust and scalable AI ecosystem. Private sector must also build relevant solutions, just as mobile devices leapfrogged landlines AI will also redefine Africa’s future, driving solutions for African challenges, be it multilingual, educational programs, climate, Smart Agriculture, mobile health diagnostics,” she said. “We will Need to build our own rails from and move, shift step change, from being passive consumers to active creators and stewards of our own AI digital future.”
To build this intelligent economy, Africa must connect the unconnected. Govern data sovereignty so that African data stays in Africa, equip people with skills, learn new data models and real real life use cases for Africa to help Africa accelerate its socio-economic development and AI that reflects it.
“The question is not whether Africa will be AI ready, but whether the world is ready for an African AI innovation,”Kropac said. “The AI story and its journey will be written and experienced, but I assert that for Africa’s AI evolution and its progress, that story will be written by us.”
