On April 4, 2025, a landmark moment unfolded in Kigali, Rwanda: the adoption of the African Declaration on Artificial Intelligence, jointly endorsed by the African Union, Smart Africa, and the governments of 54 African states. This document represents the most ambitious and unified AI policy framework ever established on the African continent, marking a turning point in the continent’s engagement with the global governance of emerging technologies.
Signed by national ministers and high-level representatives, the Declaration positions artificial intelligence not merely as a technological tool, but as a strategic pillar for Africa’s economic, scientific, and cultural sovereignty. It aligns with existing continental instruments such as the African Union’s Continental Strategy on AI, the Smart Africa AI for Africa Blueprint, the AU Data Policy Framework, and the AU Convention on Cybersecurity and Personal Data Protection.
From its preamble, the Declaration acknowledges “the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI)” while reaffirming the continent’s commitment to the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. But beyond this rhetorical alignment, the Declaration provides a substantive roadmap structured around guiding principles, sectoral commitments, and governance architecture.
At its core, the Declaration affirms that Africa must shape AI in its own image. As such, it proclaims:
“Sovereignty, inclusivity, and diversity in African AI design and deployment should benefit all African communities and reflect Africa’s strategic priorities, shared values, and diverse cultural contexts” (§2.1.1).
This principle is reinforced by a call for safeguards that ensure the ethical integrity of AI systems:
“Safeguards must be implemented to prevent harm and protect privacy, ethics, transparency, and explainability while prioritizing human dignity, rights, freedoms, and environmental sustainability” (§2.1.2).
The Declaration also identifies the development of AI talent as a continental priority. It mandates the creation of educational pathways for AI literacy, from youth curricula to doctoral programs, and announces the establishment of an African AI Scientific Panel:
“We endorse the creation of an African AI Scientific Panel, which shall consist of AI experts from Africa and the diaspora […] providing a knowledge base for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners” (§3.1.2).
In a remarkable step toward data sovereignty, the Declaration commits to developing African open data frameworks, underpinned by strong data governance rules:
“We shall establish a framework for African open data sets and open AI models […] ensuring security and privacy through standardized data formats, metadata, exchange protocols, and encryption standards” (§3.2.1–3.2.2).
Crucially, the Declaration also sets the stage for massive financial mobilization. A $60 billion Africa AI Fund is announced, seeking to catalyze AI infrastructure, research, and entrepreneurship:
“A $60 billion Africa AI Fund will be established, leveraging public, private, and philanthropic capital, to create a safe, inclusive, and competitive African AI economy” (§3.5.1).
This unprecedented fund will support infrastructure deployment, such as distributed high-performance computing (HPC), and regional data centers with minimized carbon footprints (§3.3.3), as well as support AI incubators, regulatory sandboxes, and innovation hubs across the continent (§3.4.1–3.4.2).
Finally, to ensure effective coordination, the Declaration creates a new pan-African governance body:
“We endorse the establishment of the Africa AI Council, under the leadership of the Smart Africa Steering Committee […] to ensure high-level engagement and strategic alignment with continental and global digital transformation efforts” (§3.7.1).
This Declaration is not merely a statement of intent: it is a collective assertion of Africa’s place in shaping the global AI order. In a geopolitical context where AI has become a vector of power and influence, this text asserts that African nations will no longer be passive users of foreign technologies but active shapers of their own digital destinies.
Too often absent from the global discourse on AI, Africa now positions itself as a normative force—articulating its own vision of equitable, ethical, and sovereign technological development. The African Declaration on Artificial Intelligence is, in every respect, a historic text.
We wish to express our warmest thanks to our founding member of the International Law Association for Artificial Intelligence (ILAAI) for Tunisia, Mr. Sami Kallel attorney at the Tunis Bar and who kindly shared this important information with us.
ILAAI, now includes leading lawyers and legal scholars from more than twenty countries across all continents. It is a community committed to the open and rigorous exchange of legal knowledge and insights around artificial intelligence. We are convinced that, in the face of a global phenomenon such as AI, our legal reflections must also be global—and not narrowly local. The African Declaration on AI is a vivid reminder of that imperative.
