The beautiful continent of Africa and responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Africa has a booming youthful population filled with talents, energy and linguistic diversity to do the kind of innovative work that stimulates rapid growth. The African Economic Outlook 2021 by the African Development Bank indicates that about 30 million Africans were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 crisis and it is estimated that about 39 million Africans could fall into extreme poverty in 2021. As Africa continues to grapple with the COVID-19 crisis, those with lower levels of education, and working in informal jobs are most likely affected due to measures like lockdowns put in place by governments to address the spread of the virus. This is set to widen the existing social inequality gaps.
This calls for Africa’s policymakers, stakeholders, and development partners to find innovative solutions to build a more resilient future. Innovative approaches to address governance challenges faced by African countries will aid in meeting the rising expectations of growth on the continent. The fourth industrial revolution (4IR) with AI has a great potential of transforming Africa. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development makes a commitment to ensure “no one will be left behind” and to “endeavor to reach the furthest behind first”. This means that Africa should not be left behind, as technological advances create new opportunities for economic growth and prosperity. Africa leveraging on artificial intelligence (AI) can open up opportunities to bridge both the development divide, and technological divide, and to accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the African Union (AU) 2063 Agenda.
The term ‘Artificial intelligence’ (AI) refers to a suite of technologies that can perform complex tasks when acting in conditions of uncertainty, including visual perception, speech recognition, natural language processing, reasoning, learning from data and a range of optimisation problems. AI is the science of making things smart. It is simply human intelligence exhibited by machines. The most common approach to achieve AI through systems that learn from experience to find patterns in a set of data is referred to as machine learning. AI systems can now compose text, audio, and images to a sufficiently high standard that humans have a hard time telling the difference between outputs for some applications of the technology.
AI community in Africa is active and booming
The machine-learning (ML) community in Africa is booming and active over the last few years. It is worth pointing out communities like Deep Learning Indaba, Zindi and Data Science Africa (DSA) among many other vibrant groups on the continent with the quest to strengthen machine learning and AI in Africa. These ML communities demonstrate that Africans would like to be active shapers and owners of AI technological advances and seen as observers and receivers of the ongoing progress on AI. However, more investment in education, and also investment in adapting and adopting innovations is needed to address the challenges in Africa.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can rapidly create profound disruptions and enable impacts across several critical sectors like agriculture, health, and education, of the economy. Figure 1 is a high-level view of “must know” emerging technologies and trends that show promise in delivering a high degree of competitive advantage over the next five to ten years. For instance, AI-driven innovations, quantum machine learning (ML), generative AI are set to accelerate growth, and lead to new innovative solutions that humans may have otherwise missed. Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 30% of new pharmaceutical drugs and materials will be systemically discovered using generative AI techniques.
Furthermore, AI can contribute to improving the quality of transportation and urban living, improve governance, mitigate the effects of climate change or predict natural disasters, aid in humanitarian response, improve agricultural productivity, and facilitate greater access to information and knowledge.
Responsible governance on AI can produce positive implications on sustainable development
AI is set to have a significant positive impact on society due to potential applications across critical sectors of the economy. It is a key driver for socio-economic development globally, and can contribute to alleviating some of the world’s problems and achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Leveraging on the emerging use of artificial intelligence can accelerate the sustainable development goals in Africa through appropriate design and responsible implementation.
The ultimate impact of a general-purpose technology like AI calls for sound accountable mechanisms that will generate a comprehensive and collectively shared understanding of AI’s development and deployment cycle. Africa will fully benefit from AI should there be continuous dialogue between several stakeholders of the economy, and domain experts on knowledge sharing, developing both ethical and legal frameworks that will ensure the effective governance of AI, progressing AI social opportunities while mitigating its risks. We do encourage African countries to consider establishing national data and AI strategy with a human-centric design approach and ethics principles. Identification and clear definition of innovative ways where governments can best leverage AI to achieve national strategic priorities should be well considered. This will lead to identifying the questions that matter in the local context. We do recommend use of the values-based principles and recommendations for policy makers outlined in the OECD AI Principles. Principles to inform use on AI by stakeholders and development practitioner are well documented in a recent AFD Policy Paper on the emerging uses of technology for development. We believe these will pave the way to maximizing AI’s potential for good, promote use of AI that is innovative and trustworthy and that respects human rights and democratic values.
In solving some of today’s challenges in the continent, access to data that resides within the private sector to create public value is key to growth. It is important to create a regulatory environment that encourages private-public partnerships on AI for health, education, agriculture and other key sectors of the economy. This calls for new forms of collaborations that go beyond public-private partnerships. We do see this as essential in maximizing the potential of data and AI to improve people’s lives and reduce inequality in the African continent.
Investing in education, capacity building, and research and development initiatives will help create more new jobs for the youthful population on the continent. The current low agricultural productivity in Africa can be improved upon leveraging on the emerging uses of AI systems. There is a rich diversity of culture and talent in Africa. It is time that Africans take the lead in building solutions to address challenges in Africa. As such it is important for decision-makers in the public and private sector to expand their understanding of AI’s relevance to the economy.
What can be done ? Why does it matter now?
Here are four thoughts that can be consider in the quest to accelerate transitions to the SDGs are:
- Need for new forms of collaborations and social innovation to build inclusive AI solutions in Africa: There is a need to create an environment to enable multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder collaboration to develop inclusive solutions leveraging on AI for job creation for youth, alleviation of poverty and reduction of existing social inequalities. Governments need to consistently engage in public dialogue with citizens, private sector, academic & research institutions, civil society, and AI domain experts. The Africa continent might offer a context with which AI systems can be used to tackle pressing unique challenges like social inequalities, poverty, and personalised education for all. For instance, the linguistic diversity on the African continent does provide an ideal opportunity to develop innovative solutions with locally relevant content to address key challenges, and thus leaving no one behind.
- Acknowledging that data is an important asset for policy makers: AI-driven innovations do rely on data. The increased demand for access to timely, relevant, and quality data is often a challenge in most developing countries. The value of data in supporting decision makers is critical to chart Africa’s path out of the pandemic and into a brighter, post-pandemic future. As such there is the need to invest in data literacy, open data sharing initiatives, data related infrastructures, and human capital development.
- Need to make use of data and AI responsibility frameworks: To ensure that individuals trust and act on findings driven from AI systems, it is essential that data is collected and used in an effective and responsible manner. Data responsibility and the attainment of a social license play a large role in engineering trust on AI-driven innovations with audiences who may otherwise be inclined to ignore or reject findings. Both are also essential in minimizing the potential for harm. African countries can leverage social innovation incorporating collective intelligence in the quest to establish such policy frameworks.
- Investment in human capital development and knowledge building is essential to establish a framework of ethics and standards within which AI can be implemented to innovate responsibly to mitigate risk. This will require data and AI literacy for all citizens, especially for politicians and policy makers. Literacy on AI can contribute to building trust, stimulating entrepreneurship, and boost citizen engagement on public policy issues. Identification and clear definition of areas where governments can best leverage AI to achieve national strategic priorities should be well considered. There is a need to support investments in AI research and development in Africa with grants, and by facilitating collaborative research networks.
In summary, the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) driven by artificial intelligence (AI) has a great potential of transforming Africa. An innovation-led, knowledge-based economy in Africa leveraging AI will require creating an environment to enable multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder collaboration for innovation and entrepreneurship leading to jobs for youth, alleviation of poverty and reduction of existing social inequalities. Investment in human capital development and knowledge building is critical to set a framework of ethics and norms in which AI can innovate responsibly to mitigate any potential risks.
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