Africa

Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning (ML) systems, is increasingly used in mental healthcare to support diagnosis and treatment. These systems analyse large datasets—including speech patterns, social media activity, and biometric indicators—to detect conditions such as depression and anxiety. Although often framed as objective and clinically neutral, these technologies embed epistemic and cultural assumptions derived largely from Global North contexts. This paper advances

The appointment suggests that the unicorn is moving from securing a regulatory foothold in East Africa’s biggest economy to building a banking business.

All On, Nigeria's leading off-grid energy access investor is pleased...

SA remained among Africa's most targeted countries for cyber attacks in June, according to Check Point Software Technologies.

WAEMU, an eight-country region, wants to build a connected fintech ecosystem that bypasses the interoperability problem much of Africa faces. At Catapult Africa 2026, investors, founders, and regulators gathered to discuss what that future would look like.

As part of a review of its operating structure process, the company says a limited number of roles have been affected.

Many South African companies have no clear picture of where their data lives, which jurisdiction governs it or what happens if something goes wrong, says Richard Frost, head of technology solutions and consulting at Armata Cyber Security.

Through its Managed Print Services offering, Kyocera helps companies monitor and manage their print environments more effectively, says Yunus Docrat, service manager at Kyocera Document Solutions South Africa.

In today's edition: eMedia launches Openview Stream || OPPO opens its fifth store in Egypt || Yas secures $307 million investment from EBRD || Kenyan court raises the standard on SIM-swap fraud

arXiv:2607.10317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Algorithmic decision systems in financial services often rely on data proxies that inadvertently encode structural inequalities. This paper introduces a hierarchical human-AI triage model for Point of Sale fraud detection in the Nigerian FinTech sector. Adopting a We Are All Equal worldview, we address the challenge of discrimination laundering, wherein the system misinterprets infrastructure related aleatoric noise such as rural network timeouts

Welcome to the African Union Commission. It is a great honour to welcome you to the Innovating Education in Africa 2026 Expo, where we bring together policymakers, educators, researchers, innovators, ...

Within a year of deploying SchoolTry for higher education, the startup generated more revenue than it made in three years deploying SchoolTry for K-12.

Bitcoin communities and fintech startups are testing two competing models for making crypto payments work in everyday commerce across Africa.

Today, 38% of primary school–age children in South Asia and 14% in Sub-Saharan Africa attend private schools. Given the increasing prevalence of private schooling, what should governments, donors and ...

OPay reaffirmed its position as one of Nigeria's leading fintech...

BRINT Online School Built a Cross-Border Virtual School. Its Brint...

The African Union Commission (AUC), through its Department of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (ESTI), has successfully concluded the Peer Review and Knowledge Exchange Meeting on Higher ...

The Inspector-General of Police's Cyber Vetting and Enforcement Team (CVET) of the Ghana Police Service has arrested 11 individuals, including Nigerian nationals, over allegations of using AI-generated deepfake videos to impersonate John Dr ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1579#7502)

The NPAEEA, supported by the Global Program on Sustainability (GPS), introduces a groundbreaking approach to integrating environmental and economic data. It prioritizes the development of six key ...

On Techpoint Digest, we discuss how Starlink has frozen new sign-ups in seven Kenyan counties, how Andrea Aid wants to improve medical crowdfunding, and how South Africans claim Facebook is restricting accounts without warning.

The equity-free grants can range from $20,000 to $200,000.

Africa's displacement zones may be the continent's least contested fintech...

Not all misinformation consequences are equal. Faced by hundreds of thousands of false claims online and offline every day, fact checkers need a robust way to identify the important ones to check. This scalable model—used by fact checkers in trials in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East since 2024—helps forecast the potential imminent and cumulative harms of different false claims and is an early warning system for society that focuses efforts on factually false claims that cause real-world harm

Andrea Aid, a Port Harcourt-based startup is building a medical crowdfunding platform that helps patients raise money for treatment by connecting them with donors.

How to apply effective governance to harness the benefits of A.I. and mitigate its risks ...

Transport Explore transport Featured topics Artificial intelligence How to apply effective governance to harness the benefits of A.I. and mitigate its risks Climate mitigation and net-zero transition ...

One morning in 2019, Adebayo Alonge was in a Cape Town hotel room, preparing to demonstrate his startup’s AI answer to a serious problem in African health care: counterfeit medication, which kills thousands of people across the continent every year. The RxScanner is a handheld spectrometer that scans a pill with infrared light, then sends the item’s molecular profile to an AI model equipped with a pharmaceutical database. In seconds, the AI identifies the medication from its molecular profile—or

Columbia Global Freedom of Expression seeks to contribute to the development of an integrated and progressive jurisprudence and understanding on freedom of expression and information around the world. It maintains an extensive database of international case law. This is its newsletter dealing with recent developments in the field. Across Kenya, more than 350 anti-government protesters were arrested last […]

Artificial intelligence depends on large-scale compute resources and their supporting infrastructure. However, AI governance debates treat compute primarily as a technical input rather than as an outcome of investment, ownership, and financial control. This paper examines AI infrastructure investment flows across Africa through a systematic analysis of 46 publicly announced projects totalling USD $12.7 billion between 2019 and 2025. Using a value chain framework, we analyze who invests in AI-rel

This exclusive Cogs of War interview is with Maxwell Maduka, the co-founder and chief engineer of Terra Industries, an African defense technology company building autonomous drone and counter-drone systems designed for the continent’s operating conditions. As cheap imported airframes flood African markets and non-state actors employ drones across the Sahel, we asked Max why Terra is betting on Africa building its own defense industrial base.Cheap Turkish and Chinese drones and sensor systems hav

An exclusive survey of AI workers in Kenya reveals how automated management affects their livelihoods. Unions and advocacy groups are beginning to fight back.

JOHANNESBURG, April 27 (Reuters) - South Africa has withdrawn its first draft national AI policy after revelations that it ​contained fictitious sources in its reference list ‌which appeared to have been AI-generated. "The most plausible e ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1467#7450)

Low-resource African languages lack text corpora needed for language model training. We investigate whether ASR pipelines can extend text resources for two typologically distinct West African languages: Fongbe (tonal, diacritic-rich) and Hausa (non-tonal). We fine-tune MMS-300M on a curated 12.3-hour Fongbe dataset, achieving 9.48% WER on the ALFFA benchmark - a 78% relative reduction from the prior 44.04% baseline - while preserving tonal diacritics critical to the language. For Hausa, we apply

In 2025 and 2026, two events settled questions that had until then been speculative. In the first, a large language model executed the great majority of a state-aligned cyber-espionage campaign on its own, with human operators intervening at only a few decision points. In the second, the most capable cyber-relevant model was placed under a controlled-access program limited to a vetted set of United States technology firms, allied governments, and European standards bodies; that perimeter include

The rapid digitalisation of financial systems has improved operational efficiency and financial inclusion while simultaneously increasing exposure to sophisticated forms of cyber-enabled fraud and electronic financial misconduct. Conventional auditing systems, which largely depend on retrospective verification and rule-based monitoring, increasingly struggle to address the complexity and speed of modern financial crime. Consequently, financial institutions are progressively adopting Artificial I

User Experience Research (UXR) in a legal and regulatory contexts presents unique challenges that require specialised approaches to protect vulnerable populations whilst generating actionable insights. Digital consultation, appointment booking, and medication delivery platforms show promise for extending care access; however, their real-world effectiveness is curtailed by an absence of theoretically grounded user experience research (UXR) methodologies that adequately account for the psychosocia

Language models (LMs) can exhibit biases based on variations in their dialects, even in the absence of a dialect label, a behavior known as covert dialect bias. In this work, we quantify covert dialect bias in online discourse by evaluating how LMs associate stereotypical traits (derived from social psychology research on racial bias) with intent-equivalent tweets in Standard American English (SAE) and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). While prior work shows that LMs associate more neg

Retail analytics holds immense potential for enhancing decision-making, efficiency, and competitiveness in the retail sector. However, its adoption across traditional and hybrid retail industries in emerging markets remains inconsistent. This study examines the adoption of analytics technologies in South Africa's traditional retail sector, utilizing the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework and the Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) theory. Drawing on a qualitative multi-case study of

Sub-Saharan Africa faces persistently high student-teacher ratios and shortages of qualified teachers, limiting students' access to personalized learning support and formative assessment. To address this challenge, we present Adesua, a WhatsApp-based AI Teaching Assistant for science education that extends the Kwame for Science platform. Adesua leverages WhatsApp's widespread adoption in Africa to provide accessible, curriculum-aligned learning support for Junior High School (JHS) and Senior Hig

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now embedded in educational, civic, and economic systems worldwide. For African primary and secondary education, this creates a double imperative: to prepare a young population (over sixty per cent of Africans are under twenty-five) for AI-mediated labour markets without uncritically importing curricula designed for other linguistic, cultural, and socio-political contexts. The African Union's Continental AI Strategy (2024) and the 2025 Africa Declaration on AI hav