Looking ahead to the next 12 months, what capabilities or infrastructure do you see as most critical for advancing AI in countries like Kenya and across the African continent?

If I had all the money in the world, my investment priorities would be locally relevant data and compute resources.  Building impactful AI in Africa starts with high-quality, ground truth data. Collecting this data—especially from communities—is costly and time-consuming, but essential for developing contextually relevant models.

And once you have the data, you need to be able to work with it. Even when local researchers are ready to build and localize AI models, the cost of compute remains a major barrier. We definitely need to channel significant investment into affordable, accessible compute power to level the playing field and enable the homegrown innovation that can drive local social impact.

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