Africa Must Define Its Own Artificial Intelligence Model, Urges Yves Kokou

Yves Kokou, coordinator at CERDI, urged African decision-makers to build a sovereign AI ecosystem tailored to the continent's realities, based on controlled digital infrastructure. He emphasized that Africa already has many talents capable of leading this transformation, but the challenge is to connect these skills and set priorities to avoid being mere consumers of foreign technologies. Kokou advocates for developing AI solutions that address local challenges such as the informal sector, linguistic diversity, and limited digital infrastructure access. He mentions Niger's example of a telecom operator launching the 'Spam Alert' service as a local initiative.