It’s unclear what’s behind the second strategy, but Seydina Ndiaye, a program director on the Cheikh Hamidou Kane Digital University in Dakar who helped draft the event agency’s white paper, claims it was drafted by a tech lobbyist from Switzerland. The commission’s strategy calls for African Union member states to declare AI a national priority, promote AI startups, and develop regulatory frameworks to deal with safety and security challenges. But Ndiaye expressed concerns that the document doesn’t reflect the perspectives, aspirations, knowledge, and work of grassroots African AI communities. “It’s a copy-paste of what’s happening outside the continent,” he says.
Vukosi Marivate, a pc scientist on the University of Pretoria in South Africa who helped found the Deep Learning Indaba and is often called an advocate for the African machine-learning movement, expressed fury over this turn of events on the conference. “These are things we shouldn’t accept,” he declared. The room full of information wonks, linguists, and international funders brimmed with frustration. But Marivate encouraged the group to forge ahead with constructing AI that advantages Africans: “We don’t must wait for the principles to act right,” he said.
Barbara Glover, a program manager for the African Union Development Agency, acknowledges that AI researchers are offended and frustrated. There’s been a push to harmonize the 2 continental AI strategies, but she says the method has been fractious: “That engagement didn’t go as envisioned.” Her agency plans to maintain its own version of the continental AI strategy, Glover says, adding that it was developed by African experts fairly than outsiders. “We’re capable, as Africans, of driving our own AI agenda,” she says.
DEEP LEARNING INDABA 2024
This all speaks to a broader tension over foreign influence within the African AI scene, one which goes beyond any single strategic document. Mirroring the skepticism toward the African Union Commission strategy, critics say the Deep Learning Indaba is tainted by its reliance on funding from big foreign tech firms; roughly 50% of its $500,000 annual budget comes from international donors and the remainder from corporations like Google DeepMind, Apple, Open AI, and Meta. They argue that this money could pollute the Indaba’s activities and influence the topics and speakers chosen for discussion.
But Mohamed, the Indaba cofounder who’s a researcher at Google DeepMind, says that “just about all that goes back to our beneficiaries across the continent,” and the organization helps connect them to training opportunities in tech firms. He says it advantages from a few of its cofounders’ ties with these firms but that they don’t set the agenda.
Ndiaye says that the funding is crucial to maintain the conference going. “But we’d like to have more African governments involved,” he says.
To Timnit Gebru, founder and executive director on the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), which supports equitable AI research in Africa, the angst about foreign funding for AI development comes all the way down to skepticism of exploitative, profit-driven international tech firms. “Africans [need] to do something different and never replicate the identical issues we’re fighting against,” Gebru says. She warns in regards to the pressure to adopt “AI for every little thing in Africa,” adding that there’s “lots of push from international development organizations” to make use of AI as an “antidote” for all Africa’s challenges.
Siminyu, who can be a researcher at DAIR, agrees with that view. She hopes that African governments will fund and work with people in Africa to construct AI tools that reach underrepresented communities—tools that may be utilized in positive ways and in a context that works for Africans. “We needs to be afforded the dignity of getting AI tools in a way that others do,” she says.
