ICT4D 2026: Is Africa’s Response the blueprint for resisting the AI Inevitability narrative?

All roads led to Nairobi from the 20th to 22nd of May 2026 for the ICT4D conference, where sessions centred on the theme “Delivering impact through digital transformation, together.” The MERL Tech Initiative (MTI) was busy leading some amazing sessions as a consortium partner. We led panels on evaluating GenAI challenge funds, resourcing African language NLP for MERL, joined a session on Voice AI, and facilitated a workshop on Competencies for Made in Africa AI in MERL. 

The week was packed with rich conversations and impressive technology demonstrations. It was fascinating to see how people are advancing geospatial intelligence and climate early warning systems, while still keeping community farmers at the centre of the work. I had stimulating conversations around how technology can support mental health, with some genuinely thought-provoking ideas emerging from those discussions. The innovations on display during the tech demonstrations were truly standout, each offering a fresh and purposeful approach to solving some of  Africa’s problems. Particularly eye-opening was learning about deeper strategies for safety by design, especially around gendered considerations, and how embedding these principles can actually give consumer-facing technology a meaningful competitive edge.

In this post, I want to share my reflections of the entire experience and some key learning and insights. 

Minimum Viable Intelligence: Africa’s Existing Asset 

A lightning talk by Nasubo Ongoma of Qhala was one of the highlights of the event. She posed what may be the most critical question facing the continent: with Africa accounting for less than 1% of global compute, how can we realistically expect to compete with the Global North? More importantly, where do we even begin to build? 

She reinforced the persistent gap in African language datasets, noting that much is lost in translation when English continues to serve as the default language in AI models. Her argument is that to build AI for Africa, we must first understand and respect the constraints we are operating within, and design around them. If we do this well, we may actually find a way to create and use AI in Africa in a way that is distinctly and powerfully our own.

Central to this is the nuance of how we can meaningfully layer in existing knowledge systems and cultural frameworks as we build. For technology to truly work in Africa, it cannot be imposed from the outside; community practices and indigenous knowledge must be treated as valid knowledge systems in the development process. AI development in Africa must come with caution, to avoid repeating past mistakes and reinforcing the existing inequalities that place Africa in a perpetual adopter position. 

Building for and with “community” requires formative research and responsible digital design 

“Community” was a common and revolving word at this conference. Yet, I kept finding myself in sessions that questioned, reflected on, and interrogated the extent to which communities are actually involved in the technologies built in their name. Practitioners are recognising a critical gap: designing for the sake of technology, rather than designing with the people it is meant to serve. The innovation boom has accelerated this disconnect, prioritising novelty and scalability over meaningful community engagement. 

A fundamental question remains largely unanswered: how do we actually measure community engagement in tech? Without clear metrics, “community” risks becoming performative, a buzzword dressed up as a value. This is precisely where formative research becomes a valuable asset. Formative research and human- and community-centred design processes aim to ensure that community voices are not an afterthought but a foundation that shapes not just what is built, but the why, for whom, and to what end.

Data Colonialism 

While it was encouraging that the organizers elevated this topic to a main agenda item, the execution left much to be desired. I found it deeply problematic for conversations on decolonizing data in the Global Majority to be led by individuals from Silicon Valley and the US. Chief among the issues worth naming explicitly is the positioning of “my experience working in Africa, with Africans, or with African organizations” as a sufficient basis for authority. 

This framing is problematic because it flattens and renders invisible the African perspective, reducing a continent of immense diversity to a backdrop for external expertise. Our data has been extracted for decades, and now even the story of that extraction, i.e. its meaning, its harm, its trajectory; is being told on our behalf.

This is what left a bitter taste at ICT4D for me. It raised an uncomfortable but necessary question: why were leading African scholars and practitioners with lived experience not at the center of this conversation? Local voices and in particular, Black African women, feminist scholars, and human rights organizations have been theorizing, documenting, and challenging these dynamics for years. It is only right, then, that the owners of the story be the ones to tell it.

Building on top of Big Tech models: The need to decentralize power as Africa builds 

The work of developing AI in Africa cannot happen without directly addressing the issue of power dynamics. It was apparent from the conversations that big tech models such as Open AI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google DeepMind remain the foundational base upon which Africa-focused models are built. While the development of more localized base models in African languages is underway, it is important to continue asking: what alternative models exist, and how are they being built? 

Equally critical is the question of data ownership and governance — who is collecting data, who controls it, and is it flowing back to the communities that produced it? Community hesitancy and resistance to data leaving the continent reflects a deeper, legitimate concern about extractive practices that have long characterized Africa’s relationship with outside institutions. 

From the questions raised in various discussions it was a stark reality that vast amounts of institutional knowledge exist in low-resourced African languages, yet many communities lack the technical capacity and resources to transform that knowledge into structured, local-language datasets. 

What is needed, therefore, is a deliberate decentralization of power, away from big tech and toward smaller organizations, community-led initiatives, and sovereign language models. Alongside this decentralization must come a re-centralization of collaboration: among African institutions, across the Global South, and with aligned partners globally who are committed to equitable AI development. This requires intentional cooperation, shared infrastructure, and a collective insistence that the terms of AI development on the continent are set and led by Africans themselves.

The Future of Digital Development: Toward African-Led, Locally Grounded AI

The threads running through ICT4D 2026 converge on a single, uncomfortable truth: localized, Africa led, Africa owned efforts are the only way to reap AI benefits that develop the continent and benefit Africans. Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) offer a rare entry point to this dynamic. They are advancing localization agendas because their commercial viability depends on it. The reach of MNO infrastructure into underserved communities combined with their investment in local language services positions MNOs as consequential actors in the AI localization story. 

The lesson here is not that MNOs are the solution, but that localization follows where incentives are aligned, and MNOs are strategic partners and enablers for the pathway of locally grounded AI. The hard work here will be ensuring that this localization serves communities and not merely markets – a distinction that matters enormously.

What is clear is that no amount of community-centered design, sovereign data governance, or African-language AI will gain sustainable ground without an enabling environment at the policy level. The conversations at ICT4D made clear that the public sector holds significant leverage over the terms on which AI enters African contexts through regulation, procurement, data policy, and infrastructure investment. This makes governments an important partner for scaling digital development that is accountable, equitable, and durable. Yet engaging them is rarely straightforward. High turnover in key positions, limited AI expertise, and stretched institutional capacity mean that knowledge and momentum can be lost quickly. Election cycles also bring shifting priorities, and AI itself is increasingly becoming a political issue. These realities don’t make government engagement optional, they make it more necessary to approach governments with strategy.

Africans are the future of digital development in Africa

ICT4D 2026 ultimately surfaced that the tools, the talent, the cognisance and the urgency exist. From the question of who tells the story of data colonialism, to who governs the datasets, to who sets the terms of AI development on the continent, the answer must increasingly and unapologetically be Africans themselves. The future of digital development in Africa will be determined by the strength of the ecosystems, institutions, and communities who are leading these efforts. And that is precisely why this moment feels like a blueprint.

The AI inevitability narrative would have us believe that the path forward is already written, with Africa’s role is simply to adopt, adapt, and keep up.  What emerged from Nairobi is that the African ecosystem is actively choosing the terms of its own digital future and building blocks of an alternative path, one that refuses extraction. Insistence on indigenous knowledge systems, community-centered design, sovereign data governance, African language models, and African-led policy conversations, are not just good practices, they are acts of resistance. If Africa can hold this line, investing in local ecosystems, demanding accountability from big tech, and keeping communities at the heart of innovation, then yes, Africa’s response is the blueprint.

AI Use Disclosure: The blog utilized Claude Sonnet 4.6 for copyediting, grammar and syntax. The copyedited content was reviewed thoroughly and further edited by the author. The content remains the author’s original ideas and reflects the author’s thoughts and style of writing.