The AU’s Continental Dilemma: What 55 Nations Must Agree on Before Governing AI

As the African Union (AU) finalizes its Continental AI Strategy achieving consensus across all 55 member states remains critical to establishing unified technology governance. 

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the global economy, the debate over how Africa should govern emerging technologies is confronting a fundamental question: what does the continent need to control, share and build together to ensure AI delivers real value locally?

Opening the policy discussions during the ITW Africa event, Souhila Amazouz, Principal AI and Digital Policy Coordinator at the African Union Commission outlined the core challenge facing the bloc’s 55 member states. She emphasized that Africa must design a regulatory approach that reflects the unique African context, responds directly to national priorities, and establishes baseline harmonization across the entire continent.

The high-level panel brought together a diverse group of technology, policy and field experts, including Angela Wamola, Head of Africa at GSMA; Mehdi Snene from the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies; Dr. Girmaw Abebe Tadesse of Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab; Robert Ifeonu, Digital Development Specialist at the Central Bank of Nigeria; alongside industry leaders Tadesse, Mfongo and Lillian Nalwoga. Together, the panelists explored how to bridge the gap between high-level policy declarations and practical implementation across Africa’s varied legal and economic landscapes.

A central focal point of the discussion was defining data sovereignty in a way that fuels commercial growth rather than creating fragmented barriers.

Angela Wamola argued that technological sovereignty should not be interpreted as national isolation or individual pursuit of self-reliance, which often leads to lost opportunities and inefficient spending. Instead, she urged African nations to pursue “strategic autonomy” across the entire technology value chain encompassing power generation, data centers, hardware infrastructure and cloud connectivity.

Wamola warned that as long as Africa remains primarily a consumer rather than a producer of technology, its individual markets will lack scale. By treating data, computing power, and connectivity as a single integrated continental foundation, member states can ensure their sovereign data efforts remain commercially sustainable and globally competitive.

While continental policies set a high-level direction, policy analysts cautioned that abstract regulatory documents risk becoming well-articulated strategies that fail in real-world application.

Addressing the day-to-day challenges faced by public regulators, Robert Ifeonu highlighted that government institutions across Africa frequently struggle with basic operational tasks, such as selecting viable AI use cases and balancing policy trade-offs. He stressed that the African Union’s governance framework must provide concrete, actionable tools tailored to specific public sector entities. Regulators need clear guidelines defining what an AI framework means in practice for a central bank overseeing financial technology or a tax authority automating revenue collection. Panelists Tadesse and Mfongo reinforced this point, noting that a unified continental baseline is only effective if governments receive concrete tools they can actually deploy.

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Beyond domestic implementation, a unified continental stance is essential to ensuring Africa’s voice is heard in international technology governance forums.

Mehdi Snene urged African delegations to formulate a single, cohesive policy position ahead of the upcoming United Nations Global Dialogue on AI Governance in New York. By presenting a coordinated front, the continent can position itself as an active architect of global AI standards rather than a passive recipient of external rules.

Concluding the panel, Angela Wamola noted that the ultimate test of the African Union’s model law will not be whether it imposes rigid, identical clauses across all member states, but whether it creates a flexible ecosystem. By allowing 55 nations to progress at their own individual speeds while staying aligned with a shared continental vision, Africa can build a resilient digital economy rooted in local needs and collective strength.