Africa Just Took a Giant Leap: Why the New Africa AI Council Matters More Than You Think

On November 17, 2025, Smart Africa officially unveiled the Africa Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Council, a move that signals a new era for the continent. For a while, Africa has been buzzing
with AI innovation from fintech and language models to agriculture and healthtech but scattered,
uncoordinated, and often dependent on external systems.
This Council is different.
It represents the first truly continental, multi-stakeholder effort to shape Africa’s AI future
based on African values, African challenges and African opportunities. And if this succeeds, it
will redefine Africa’s role in the global digital economy.
At DORB AI, where our mission is to build intelligent systems tailored for African markets, we
see this as a watershed moment.
1. A Unified Continental Strategy (Finally)
For years, African countries have built digital and AI strategies in silos. Progress happened, but
unevenly.
The Africa AI Council brings together:
● 7 ICT Ministers from across the continent
● 8 leading AI experts and industry leaders
● Backing from Smart Africa, the African Union, and the ITU
This is the first time Africa has:
● a shared vision
● shared standards
● shared governanceimp
● shared mechanisms for adoption
This level of policy alignment can unlock interoperability, regional AI infrastructure and more
consistent investment channels.
2. A Focus on Six Critical Pillars That Can Transform the
Continent
The Council’s mandate is organized into six thematic areas:
a. Infrastructure
Africa needs compute capacity, data centers, and connectivity which without it, we can’t build or
compete.
The Council can help accelerate:
● national AI compute hubs
● cross-border fiber and cloud infrastructure
● local GPU access for startups and research labs
b. Data
Data being Africa’s largest hidden asset. With proper governance, privacy, and access
frameworks, Africa can safely harness health data, agricultural data, climate data, and linguistic
data. This means AI systems built for Africa not just imported to Africa.
c. Market
AI adoption is still young across many sectors, therefore standardized frameworks and shared
innovation ecosystems will grow the entire market and not just isolated pockets of progress.
d. Talent
Without skilled people, AI will remain a buzzword.
The Council can drive:
● continental AI curriculums
● AI research networks
● scholarships, labs, and training programs
● upskilling for public sector workers
And this will build an AI-powered workforce ready for 2030.
3. Turning Africa Into a Creator, Not Just a Consumer of AI
Global AI models rarely understand African languages, cultural nuances, or context and with
leaders like Masakhane, InstaDeep, Google Africa, Microsoft Africa, and top researchers
represented, the Council can push for:
● African language models
● African datasets
● African AI benchmarks
● continent-wide model evaluation standards
4. Boosting Innovation While Reducing Dependency
Africa currently depends heavily on foreign models, foreign cloud, foreign AI safety standards,
and foreign compute.
The Africa AI Council is a step toward digital sovereignty, allowing Africa to:
● set its own standards
● build its own models
● invest in its own compute infrastructure
● and negotiate international partnerships from a position of strength
What This Means for AI Startups
The new Council enables a healthier AI ecosystem where AI companies can thrive. We
foresee smoother cross-country deployments, clearer AI regulatory guidelines, easier access to
public-private partnerships, more funding streams, talent pipelines and better compute
availability.
This is the moment Africa positions itself not only as a fast-growing digital market, but as a
global AI powerhouse.

https://smartafrica.org/the-smart-africas-board-unveils-the-inaugural-africa-ai-council-to-lead-the-continents-ai-transformation/