A Personal Reflection: Exploring My Role in Africa’s Future in the Midst of the Global AI Race

Living and working in Europe has been a mirror many of us didn’t know we needed. For many Africans I’ve interacted with, moving abroad has given us the opportunity to see Africa from a much improved point of view. All of the infrastructural efficiencies; loosely defined; functional public services and access to some regional privileges has sharpened the edges of our beliefs.

I represent a unit of African engineers, professionals, builders, and entrepreneurs who have done such a migration. I also represent my fellow Pan-Africanists who believe in Ubuntu and in that the future of Africa is plural, borderless, and unapologetically ours. Being far from home has clarified what impact, community, and purpose truly mean—and what they demand of us.

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Impact: Beyond metrics, towards distance reduced

Global tech culture speaks in technical metrics—Daily Active Users, Monthly Recurring Revenue, Net Promoter Score etc. Useful, yes. But from my perspective impact is simpler: reduce the distance between potential and opportunity.

If a tool helps a young developer in Bulawayo ship her first paid project, or a market trader in Accra automate inventory without tech infrastructure barriers, that’s impact. In many global teams, success is documented and framed in layered processes. In Africa, success often shows up unannounced—in the sudden quiet of a simple WhatsApp group. There’s no dashboard for that, but you can feel the distance shrinking.

Our position between worlds lets us pair the rigour of clear metrics with the humility of asking: Whose distance did we reduce today?

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My AI excitement—and my caution

Yes, I’m excited about AI because it creates opportunity. It is a time like no other, and the unknowns of it all make it all exciting! No better time to practise faith. I see new ways to use the opportunities created by AI, that are not theoretical:

• AI assistants that work over individual WhatsApp messages for micro-retailers

• Voice bots in Xhosa, Shona, Twi, Yoruba that actually understand the languages and dialects

• Local fine-tunes for improving efficiencies in mining, communal farming, and health triage and more.

But I’m wary, because I know the terrain:

• Language deserts: Many African languages remain “low-resource,” which is a polite way of saying “ignored.” We can change that by funding community corpora, paying translators properly, and open-sourcing where possible.

• Accent bias: “Sorry, I didn’t catch that” is not neutral when it only fails on us. Evaluation sets must reflect real speech, not studio English.

• Compute and cost: The future cannot be gated behind $/token our users can’t afford. Let alone the fact that everything is hosted on the internet, which not many enjoy accessing without feeling the pinch of expensive data. Distillation, edge inference, and clever caching are economic justice by another name.

• Privacy & dignity: In places where institutions are shaky, mishandled data can harm quickly. Purpose means shipping with consent as a feature, not an afterthought.

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What Europe taught us (and what Africa keeps teaching)

Europe taught us that good process protects people, that quality scales, and that documentation is hospitality for the next engineer. It also showed us how power travels—through standards, compliance requirements, certifications, and procurement frameworks. If we want African tools on global shelves, we must speak that grammar.

Africa keeps teaching us that ingenuity thrives on constraints, that communities are not “users” but partners with memory, and that the shortest path to adoption is respect—language, trusted channels, fair practices and accessibility.

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An invitation…

If you’re in tech, building a business, creating value, or simply believe Africa should not have to ask permission to exist at scale— lift up your voice! Create and share your bit of Africa. Bring your language, your constraints, your stubborn problems, your spirituality, deep culture and curiosity. Bring your hunger to create value and your insistence that dignity travels with it.

Leaving the continent did not dilute our purpose. It distilled it. We are bridges with a bias for load-bearing. We want our tools to speak the way we do, to survive real life, and to create returns that show up true economic growth and liberation of Africa.

Impact is distance reduced. Community is belonging designed. Purpose is permission created.

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This is an unfinished article that tries to express the beauty and challenges of engaging with global tech in a way that fully represents Africa.

Let’s keep building 👩🏿‍💻✨