By Gifty Mamley Agyemang
Africa must move beyond merely adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) and begin taking ownership of the technology, its tools, data and the resources that power it, speakers at Nyanza Futures 2026 have declared.
The call was made by Mr. Kambale Musavule, Convener of Beyond AI, and Jeff Xiong, General Secretary of the Global South Academic Forum, during discussions on the future of AI and Africa’s place in the emerging global digital economy.
The two-day conference was held under the theme “From Adoption to Ownership,” a theme which seeks to challenge Africans to move from being passive users of technologies developed elsewhere to becoming creators, owners and decision-makers in the AI revolution.
Explaining the motive behind the theme, Mr. Musavule said the name Nyanza was rooted in the idea of wisdom and reflected the belief that Africans possess the knowledge and creativity required to shape the future.
He explained that the organisers had spent the past year engaging communities through monthly conversations on the last Saturday of each month to understand how people perceive AI, how it could be used and the concerns surrounding its adoption.
“We have collected some knowledge from the community about what they think about what AI can be used for and how it can be used,” he said.
He said the annual conference was therefore intended to bring together the lessons from those community conversations and develop a collective position on how AI should be implemented in African societies.
According to him, the two-day discussions are expected to address issues including data protection, the choice of AI models, electricity, infrastructure and ownership, with the possibility of producing a manifesto, declaration or people’s statement on AI.
Mr. Musavule stressed that although AI had already become part of everyday life, simply adopting technologies developed outside Africa would not be sufficient.
“We know that we have to adopt it, but adopting it is not enough,” he said.
He explained that most of the major AI tools currently being used in Africa were not built by Africans and could therefore reflect the values, assumptions and interests of the societies in which they were developed.
“Technology, as I always say, is never neutral,” he noted, stressing that the people who build technology inevitably influence the way it is designed and used.
He therefore challenged Africans to begin asking when they would move from being consumers of foreign AI tools to becoming owners and developers of their own technologies.
Mr. Musavule also drew attention to the continent’s enormous mineral wealth and its importance to the global AI ecosystem.
He noted that AI infrastructure depends on critical minerals such as cobalt, lithium and copper, many of which are found in significant quantities in Africa.
He questioned whether African countries were receiving sufficient value from the extraction of those resources.
“We have to understand it, and understand also the supply chain of AI,” he said.
According to him, Africa’s conversation about AI ownership must therefore begin not only with software and data, but also with the physical resources required to build and operate the technology.
He said Africans must ask who owns the data centres, where they are located and who ultimately benefits from the minerals and energy required to operate them.
Data sovereignty, he said, was another critical component of AI ownership.
Mr. Musavule questioned what happens to information Africans enter into international AI platforms and whether such information remains protected under African laws.
“When you put the data there, does the Ghana Data Protection Commission have any rights or control on that data, or is it going out of Ghana?” he asked.
He cited the debate surrounding a proposed health-data arrangement between Ghana and the United States as an example of the importance of protecting sensitive personal information.
He said Ghana’s decision to reject the transfer of citizens’ health data demonstrated the importance of countries taking firm positions on data sovereignty.
For Jeff Xiong, General Secretary of the Global South Academic Forum, AI should not be presented as a mysterious or highly technical technology accessible only to experts.
He said the development of large language models had made AI easier for ordinary people to understand because the systems can process and respond to natural language.
“Ordinary people in Ghana should not be scared of AI. Don’t be scared of those fancy technical jargons,” he urged.
Mr. Xiong encouraged Ghanaians to begin experimenting with AI, saying that people could discover practical ways of using the technology to solve problems and develop information tools.
Mr. Xiong argued that the complexity traditionally associated with software development and coding had created a situation in which ordinary people depended heavily on experts and large technology companies.
He said that dependence had allowed technology companies, particularly those in Silicon Valley, to maintain a strong influence over who creates information tools and who benefits financially from them.
However, he said AI could change that dynamic by allowing more people to create software and information tools for themselves.
“Anybody can use AI to create software, to create information tools for themselves,” he said.
He urged Africans to take advantage of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) offered by major AI models to develop tools suited to their own circumstances.
“We should build our tools based on our own condition, for our own benefit,” he said.
On whether Ghana and Africa were ready for the AI revolution, Mr Xiong acknowledged that significant challenges remained, particularly in literacy, electricity and digital infrastructure.
However, he rejected the idea that Africa should wait until all its challenges had been resolved before participating in the AI revolution.
“I don’t like to have a defeated mood in the continent,” he said.
“What’s the benefit if we say we are not ready? Then what do we do? We stop. We wait for somebody to help us. That’s useless.”
He said Africa must develop the mindset that it could participate and succeed, while simultaneously addressing the infrastructure and education gaps that could limit access to the technology.
The discussions at Nyanza Futures 2026 ultimately point to a broader question: Who will own the future created by AI?
For the speakers, Africa cannot afford to remain a continent that supplies the minerals, generates the data and consumes the finished technologies while much of the economic value is created elsewhere.
The challenge, they said, is to build the knowledge, infrastructure, policies and local innovation needed to ensure that Africans become active participants in the AI economy.
The organisers’ hope the conference will culminate in a collective declaration or statement reflecting the views gathered from communities over the past year.
The message is therefore clear: Africa must not merely adopt the AI revolution. It must help shape it, own it and benefit from it.
From adoption to ownership — the future of AI in Africa must be shaped by Africans.
Ghana Must Move
From AI Adoption
To Ownership, Says
Abed Bandim