Africa’s Current Trends against AI- facilitated Colonization

Artificial intelligence (AI) is viewed as a tool for overcoming challenges across the world, including the African continent. However, experts warn against its colonization by AI if the technology is developed and promoted by international companies without the local stakeholders’ involvement. Due to such a landscape, up-to date comprehensive initiatives are in demand. The research goal is to identify African countries’ vision on AI-development policies and practices. The research materials include legislation, administrative regulations, action plans, public and business initiatives. The research methodology focused on the empirical analysis of the national governments and agencies official sites whose content was related to the topic under study. The research materials integrated over 160 publications from 11 countries regarding the AI-related issues during the period of 2023-2024. The mentioned texts were organized into the textual corpus. The QDA miner litter qualitative data analysis software was used to identify the key themes and respective clusters. These clusters were outlined, following the density-based clustering approach. Inside each cluster, its thematic focus was identified on grounds of the semantic frequency of language units identifying the conceptual items of the documents under study. The research findings have revealed eight thematic (conceptual) clusters on the major trends regarding African countries’ priorities, provided these clusters' ranking in terms of the language units (that are equal to the above-mentioned thematic concepts) frequency. The results thus outlined the vision regarding AI-driven development. It is viewed from the angle of domestic values, interests, and tasks. Therefore, this vision paves the way for inter-country cooperation, as well, however, on the principles of mutual equity, national autonomy, and equilibrium of interests model for development of AI-driven society among the African countries and their policies and practices with the rest of the world. The report will elaborate on the clusters' density and respective conceptual ranking.