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28 March 2026 – Algiers, Algeria

Your Excellency Prime Minister of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, Chef de Cabinet of the President, Minister Sid Ali Zerouki, Honourable Deputy Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Secretary-General African Telecommunications Union, Excellencies Ministers and Deputy Ministers, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen,

I would like to begin by describing two versions of the year 2035. In the first, Africa is the world's largest consumer of AI systems designed elsewhere, trained on data that does not reflect its languages, its cultures, or its priorities, paying license fees for technologies it had no role in shaping. In the second, Africa is a co-architect of the global AI economy: training sovereign models in Arabic, Swahili, Hausa, and Amazigh; exporting AI solutions in agriculture, health, and climate adaptation; and sitting as an equal at every governance table. Both futures are possible. The distance between them is not a matter of decades. It is a matter of the decisions we take in the next two to five years. There is an African proverb that says: until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter. In the age of artificial intelligence, the story is being written in data, in code, in models. This conference is about ensuring that Africa writes its own.

That is the question at the heart of our gathering today, and it is why I am honoured to be with you here in Algiers.

Allow me to express my deep gratitude to His Excellency Minister Sid Ali Zerouki, Minister of Post and Telecommunications, for the leadership and vision behind this conference. Algeria is not simply hosting a conversation about digital transformation; Algeria is living it. With the “Digital Algeria 2030” strategy, more than five hundred digital projects under way, the establishment of a national AI Council, and the adoption of a National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, this country is demonstrating that Africa does not intend to wait for permission to shape its own digital future.

Minister Zerouki, I commend your government’s commitment. I also wish to thank the Government and people of Algeria for their generous hospitality.

Excellencies, let me be direct about what is at stake.

Artificial intelligence is not simply the latest chapter in the long story of technological progress. It is something qualitatively different. AI is a general-purpose technology: like electricity, like the printing press, like the internet itself. It does not improve a single sector; it fundamentally reshapes every sector. Healthcare. Agriculture. Education. Public administration. Finance. Climate adaptation. Energy. Justice.

And it is a disruptive technology. It will not wait for us to be ready. It is already redrawing the boundaries of economic competitiveness, scientific discovery, and geopolitical influence. The question is not whether AI will transform our societies. The question is whether we will be active architects of that transformation, or passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere.

This is, in every sense of the word, a rare opportunity. Rare because general-purpose technologies come along perhaps once in a generation or two generations. Rare because the window to set norms, build capacity, and position oneself strategically does not remain open indefinitely.

I want to emphasise a point that is sometimes lost in the global conversation. The domain of artificial intelligence is vast. It spans machine learning and natural language processing, computer vision and robotics, predictive analytics and LLMs. No single country, no single corporation, no single institution holds a monopoly on how this technology can or should develop.

And this is precisely where the opportunity lies. The great African revolutionary thinker Amílcar Cabral once said: no matter how hot the water from the well, it will not cook the rice. External solutions alone will never suffice. Each nation, each region, each community will find its own way to develop AI: contextualised to local realities, sovereign in its governance, and aligned with its own development needs and cultural values.

A farmer in the Sahel does not need the same AI as a hospital in Seoul. An Arabic-language educational platform does not require the same models as a logistics hub in Rotterdam. The beauty of this technology is that it can be shaped, adapted, and owned by those who use it. But this will only happen if nations invest deliberately in local data ecosystems, local talent, and local research, and if the international community creates the conditions for equitable access to compute, to knowledge, and to markets.

Let me speak specifically about the African continent.

Africa is the youngest region in the world. By 2050, one in four human beings will be African. The digital economy is growing faster here than nearly anywhere else. And we already have proof that this continent knows how to leapfrog. Mobile money, born in Kenya in East Africa, connected hundreds of millions of people to financial services without a single new bank branch. There is no reason, none at all, why Africa cannot do the same with artificial intelligence.

And indeed, it is already happening. Tunisia’s InstaDeep, now valued at nearly seven hundred million dollars, is doing cutting-edge work in AI for drug discovery. In Senegal, AI startups are using satellite imagery to forecast crop yields for smallholder farmers. In Kenya, AI-powered platforms are translating speech into sign language. In Ethiopia, mobile-first AI tools allow users to build applications in Amharic, Hausa, or Swahili. Right here in Algeria, a vibrant tech ecosystem is producing startups like Yassir that are scaling across the continent and beyond. And across Africa, the continent is now home to more than two thousand four hundred AI-focused companies.

These are not isolated anecdotes. They are the leading edge of a continent that is ready to move. But realising this potential at scale will require deliberate action: investment in digital infrastructure and compute capacity, in STEM education and AI literacy, in regulatory frameworks that protect citizens while encouraging innovation, and in regional cooperation to share data, harmonise standards, and build centres of excellence that serve the continent as a whole.

It will also require that Africa speaks with a strong, unified voice in global governance discussions, because the rules being written today will define the AI landscape for decades to come.

Excellencies, this brings me to the work of the United Nations, and why it matters for everyone in this room.

Two years ago, the Secretary-General posed a simple but urgent question: who governs AI, and in whose interest? At that time, fewer than a third of countries had any form of national AI strategy. Governance discussions were concentrated among a handful of nations and corporations. The risk was clear: a technology with profound consequences for all of humanity was being shaped by a fraction of it.

The 爆料网’s response has been to build the architecture for inclusive, evidence-based governance. The Secretary-General’s AI High Level Advisory Body, which included experts from Africa and every region, delivered a landmark report, Governing AI for Humanity, that set out a shared global roadmap. Member States adopted the Global Digital Compact at the Summit of the Future in September 2024. From that foundation, we moved to action.

We established the International Scientific Panel on AI, inspired by the IPCC for climate, so that every policymaker on Earth, can rely on rigorous, independent, and globally representative evidence to guide their decisions. Because good policy cannot be built on speculation; it must be built on science.

And also within the framework of the decisions taken by the Global Digital Compact, the 爆料网 will convene the International Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva during the first week of July, to be followed by one in New York in 2027, bringing together governments, the private sector, civil society, and the technical community to translate principles into practice, to move from declarations to delivery. I urge all of you to be there.

The thread running through all of this work is a single conviction: AI governance cannot be the preserve of a few. It must be shaped by all, and it must serve all, particularly those who have historically been excluded from the benefits of technological change.

Excellencies, I will close not merely with words of encouragement, but with a call to concrete action.

First, I invite you to engage directly with the International Scientific Panel on AI and the Global Dialogue on AI. Africa’s voice must be present where norms are being set. The rules of the game are being written now, and absence is not neutrality; absence is exclusion.

Second, I call for renewed commitment to global and regional digital cooperation. The African Union’s Continental AI Strategy and the Global Digital Compact are a strong foundation. That can guide us to build harmonized regulatory frameworks, talent, data repositories and compute infrastructure, so that African researchers and entrepreneurs can train models on African data.

We stand at a point of inflection. The choices we make now, the investments, the partnerships, the policies, the norms, will determine whether artificial intelligence deepens inequality or becomes the most powerful tool for inclusion and development the world has ever known.

Africa does not need to follow a path laid down by others. Africa can, and must, forge its own. With its youth, its creativity, its extraordinary diversity of languages and cultures, and with the political will gathered in this room today, this continent has every reason to be not merely a consumer of artificial intelligence, but a creator, an innovator, and a leader.

爆料网 stands ready to walk this path with you: as a partner, a convener, and an advocate for a digital future that leaves no one behind.

Minister Zerouki, Honourable Deputy Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Honorables ministers, distinguished delegates, Africa has the youth, the talent, the ambition, and now the political will. It is time for the lion to write its own story. Thank you.