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Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles carefully curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since 2017 | Week 374, November 8-14, 2024 | Archive
What Africa needs to do to become a major AI player
By Abdullahi Tsanni | MIT Technology Review | November 11, 2024
3 key takeaways from the article
- Deep Learning Indaba – the annual weeklong conference, was held most recently in September at Amadou Mahtar Mbow University in Dakar, Senegal. It attracted over 700 attendees to hear about—and debate—the potential of Africa-centric AI and how it’s being deployed in agriculture, education, health care, and other critical sectors of the continent’s economy.
- Established in 2017, the Deep Learning Indaba now has chapters in 47 of the 55 African nations and aims to boost AI development across the continent by providing training and resources to African AI researchers.
- Africa is still early in the process of adopting AI technologies, but is uniquely hospitable to it for several reasons, including a relatively young and increasingly well-educated population, a rapidly growing ecosystem of AI startups, and lots of potential consumers. However, researchers’ ambitious efforts to develop AI tools that answer the needs of Africans face numerous hurdles including inadequate funding, poor infrastructure, lack of literacy in local languages, limited internet access, a scarcity of domestic data centers, and a lack of overarching policies or strategies for harnessing AI’s immense benefits—and regulating its downsides.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Africa, Artificial Intelligence, Policies, Technology
Click for the extractive summary of the articleDeep Learning Indaba – the annual weeklong conference, was held most recently in September at Amadou Mahtar Mbow University in Dakar, Senegal. It attracted over 700 attendees to hear about—and debate—the potential of Africa-centric AI and how it’s being deployed in agriculture, education, health care, and other critical sectors of the continent’s economy.
Established in 2017, the Deep Learning Indaba now has chapters in 47 of the 55 African nations and aims to boost AI development across the continent by providing training and resources to African AI researchers like Okinga-Koumu. Africa is still early in the process of adopting AI technologies, but organizers say the continent is uniquely hospitable to it for several reasons, including a relatively young and increasingly well-educated population, a rapidly growing ecosystem of AI startups, and lots of potential consumers.
However, researchers’ ambitious efforts to develop AI tools that answer the needs of Africans face numerous hurdles. The biggest are inadequate funding and poor infrastructure. Not only is it very expensive to build AI systems, but research to provide AI training data in original African languages has been hamstrung by poor financing of linguistics departments at many African universities and the fact that citizens increasingly don’t speak or write local languages themselves. Limited internet access and a scarcity of domestic data centers also mean that developers might not be able to deploy cutting-edge AI capabilities.
Complicating this further is a lack of overarching policies or strategies for harnessing AI’s immense benefits—and regulating its downsides. While there are various draft policy documents, researchers are in conflict over a continent-wide strategy. And they disagree about which policies would most benefit Africa, not the wealthy Western governments and corporations that have often funded technological innovation.
Taken together, researchers worry, these issues will hold Africa’s AI sector back and hamper its efforts to pave its own pathway in the global AI race.
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