The African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) has published a White Paper on Regulation and Responsible Adoption of AI in Africa. The White Paper sets out to demystify AI by providing the reader many already existing examples of AI uses in Africa and gives African governments recommendations on what their next steps should be.
The document is written very favorably towards AI, seeing the technology as a saving grace for major problems affecting African countries such as climate change, providing medical care to everyone and empowering local languages, e.g. making it possible to teach students in their own local languages instead of colonial world languages that to many are foreign.
From an Estonian standpoint the issue around languages hits close to home. With only around a million native speakers, Estonian is not a priority for any major tech giant. For example, iPhones are the most popular phones in Estonia, but iOS is not available in Estonian. That sounds like a real first world problem (which it is), but when we started developing Bürokratt, the first national chatbot that needed to communicate in the state’s official language it became obvious that the government needed to heavily invest in this field, starting from collecting language data and creating various language corpora.
So, it is good to see language (technology) being prioritized in the White Paper. To all (African) government officials, investing in language technology will ensure that your culture and language will remain in existence for centuries (read a long period of time, cannot give any specific time frame) and will benefit not only the educational sector, but improve almost every other sector as well.
W.r.t climate change, many listed exciting use cases that fight the problems caused by climate change were important additions to the White Paper, however, the negative aspects were left out completely. Firstly, AI will need a lot of energy which sadly will most likely mean bad things for the climate. Also, as AI can be used for good (see all the exciting use cases) it can be used for bad as well: massive misinformation campaigns amplified by AI should be expected and dealt with accordingly by every government on the continent.
The recommendations in whole were very reasonable when considered that this White Paper is meant for the whole continent of Africa. Every African government will need to consider their country’s starting point and then every recommendation on its own. This is echoed in the paper’s first recommendation of creating “national AI strategies that can clearly define the national AI priorities across all economic sectors and strengthen competitive advantage of each country.”
Additionally, and not surprisingly, all (African) governments need to consider the monetary means, because in no way are any of the suggestions cheap. Creating a strategy will alleviate this a bit, because with a strategy governments will commit their resources to certain activities, and it is more (cost)effective to finance certain activities that have already been prioritized than give funds to spontaneous projects that may not contribute to the whole as much as expected.
You can look further into AUDA’s White Paper here:
https://www.nepad.org/blog/taking-continental-leap-towards-technologically-empowered-africa-auda-nepad-ai-dialogue