Tech sovereignty in practice

Why this session

Almost every African government now has a position on technology sovereignty. Strategies have been adopted, data protection laws passed, localisation requirements written into sector regulation and national AI frameworks launched. What is much harder to establish is which of these instruments moved the needle, under what conditions, and at what cost.

The backdrop is well described in the literature. While the twentieth century saw the end of political colonialism, the twenty-first has produced a form of dependence in which control over data and cloud infrastructure substitutes for control over territory. African states host some of the fastest digital growth in the world while the infrastructure that supports that growth, the platforms running on it and the models trained from it remain largely foreign-owned. The route out of that position runs through research, development and domestic capability yet African countries are effectively absent from the global patenting record in the key enabling technologies where industrial advantage accumulates. The result is a cycle where the capability gap forces reliance on external finance and technology, and the conditions attached to that assistance tend to entrench the gap.

What the literature does not yet supply is a grounded account of implementation. Published sources record what was adopted, not what has been enforced, or what was quietly waived. There’s even less about what it cost the firms that had to comply, or what a ministry would do differently given the chance. That knowledge sits with the people who drafted, enforced, complied with or worked around these rules, and it is the reason for convening this roundtable.

Who should attend

The roundtable will convene two groups.