This is the first post in “From Delhi to Geneva and Beyond: Civil Society Voices on AI Governance”, a new MAP-AI blog series.
Artificial Intelligence is reshaping economies, governments, and our everyday lives at a pace that requires urgent and inclusive global governance. However, the voices defining this governance – the rules, norms, and institutions that will determine how AI is both developed and deployed, risk being shaped without the full participation of those most affected. This blog series brings together perspectives from civil society organizations across the Global Majority that the MAP-AI project supported to attend and participate in the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance (UNGDAI). Ahead of the UN Global Dialogue on AI governance (UNGDAI), contributors will highlight expectations and aspirations and what they hope the UNGDAI will achieve. In their wake, they will provide reflections on what was said, what was missing, and what comes next. Together, these thought pieces coalesce to form a record of how communities outside the dominant centres of AI power are engaging with AI to challenge, contribute to, and demand more from the future of AI global governance.
Africa is home to the world’s youngest population, with nearly 60% of its people under the age of 25 and a median age of 19.5 years. This demographic reality presents both a significant opportunity and a pressing challenge. While young people represent a powerful engine for economic transformation, persistently high levels of unemployment and underemployment threaten to limit the continent’s potential.
To harness this demographic dividend, Africa must strategically leverage emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, data science, digital platforms, and advanced connectivity while investing in its growing digital talent pool. By cultivating contextually relevant innovation ecosystems and equipping young people with future-ready skills, the continent can move from being a consumer of technology to a producer of digital innovation. Development approaches grounded in Africa’s realities, cultures, and priorities will be essential to ensuring that digital transformation delivers inclusive growth, meaningful livelihoods, and long-term economic competitiveness. In this context, the central ask from UNGDAI is to place empowerment of young people at the core of AI governance, recognizing AI as a social, educational, cultural, and economic development priority not merely a technological issue.
Young Africans are already engaging with AI through education platforms, social media, digital financial services, healthcare applications, and workplace technologies. Yet discussions on AI governance continue to focus primarily on regulation, safety, algorithmic accountability, and technical safeguards. While these issues are important, they are not sufficient. Empowering Africa’s youth in the age of AI requires strengthening the social institutions that shape how young people access, understand, and use technology. Schools, households, cultural systems, and economic structures all influence whether AI becomes a tool for opportunity or exclusion. This is particularly important given that most advanced AI systems used across the continent are developed elsewhere and often fail to adequately represent African languages, cultures, and knowledge systems.
Continental priorities extend beyond technical regulation to include access, inclusion, skills development, cultural representation, household dynamics, and economic empowerment. These priorities are increasingly reflected in strategies and policy. The African Union’s Continental AI Strategy, Africa Digital Compact, African Union Child Online Safety and Empowerment Policy and Data Policy Framework frame AI as a vehicle for inclusive development, emphasizing human capital, youth empowerment, digital access, cultural preservation, economic transformation, and ethical governance. They recognize that AI can either exacerbate existing inequalities or become a catalyst for innovation and shared prosperity. In parallel, UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI underscores inclusion, diversity, and capacity building. Together, these frameworks demonstrate that global AI governance must move beyond technical regulation and reflect diverse regional realities, with Africa’s youthful population positioned as a critical driver of the future of AI innovation and governance.
Safe, secure, and trustworthy AI must extend beyond technical robustness to encompass social trust, inclusion, and equitable access. AI systems that ignore local languages, cultures, and socioeconomic realities risk reinforcing exclusion and inequality. Young Africans need protection from algorithmic bias, exploitative data practices, misinformation, privacy violations, and other online harms. They also need confidence that AI systems are designed with their interests and rights in mind.
African policy initiatives including the African Union Child Online Safety and Empowerment Policy, the Continental AI Strategy and emerging institutions such as the Africa AI Council demonstrate that trustworthy AI encompasses more than transparency and technical safeguards. These initiatives place equal emphasis on human rights, safety-by-design, child-centered digital ecosystems, cultural relevance, digital literacy, youth empowerment, and inclusive multi-stakeholder governance. Their development-oriented and participatory approaches offer valuable perspectives for the UN Global Dialogue, underscoring that building public trust in AI requires fairness, meaningful community engagement, and ensuring that AI systems contribute to education, employment, social inclusion, and sustainable development
By ensuring that AI systems are ethical, secure, and accountable, Africa will empower its youth to become confident users, creators, and leaders in the AI ecosystem while championing a broader and more inclusive vision of trustworthy AI.
If Africa’s youth are to thrive in an AI-driven world, education systems must be central to the conversation. AI literacy is becoming a foundational skill, requiring young people not only to use AI tools but also to understand how they work, evaluate AI-generated information critically, and apply them responsibly and ethically. Yet many education systems across the continent still struggle to deliver basic digital literacy at scale. Without greater investment in teacher training, curriculum reform, and digital infrastructure, a new AI divide could emerge between those equipped to benefit from AI and those left behind.
The increasing introduction of AI-enabled educational technologies into African schools through donations and public-private partnerships presents both opportunities and challenges. These tools can expand access to personalized learning, support teachers, and foster digital and AI literacy. However, they also raise concerns regarding sustainability, data privacy, cultural relevance, and the risk of technological dependency if education systems become reliant on proprietary platforms and external infrastructure. Maximizing the benefits of AI in education will require approaches that emphasize local ownership, teacher empowerment, child protection, and the development of indigenous capabilities. Schools should evolve into spaces where learners experiment with AI, develop problem-solving skills, and understand both the opportunities and limitations of emerging technologies. Rather than preparing students for specific jobs with uncertain futures, education systems should cultivate adaptability, creativity, critical thinking, and ethical judgment skills that will remain essential in an AI-enabled economy. Importantly, AI partnerships should enable a transition from consumption to co-creation. African learners and institutions should foster the capacity to develop local content, build contextually relevant applications, contribute to AI research and innovation, and shape the technologies that will influence their societies. In this way, AI-enabled education will strengthen technological sovereignty and ensure that young Africans are active creators, innovators, and stewards of future technologies, not just consumers.
AI governance discussions often focus on governments and technology companies, yet families remain among the most influential actors in young people’s digital lives. Parents and guardians play a critical role in helping young people navigate online environments, manage risks, and develop responsible digital habits, even as many adults are still adapting to rapidly evolving technologies.
Empowering them therefore requires empowering families and communities. Digital parenting initiatives, public awareness campaigns, and community-based AI literacy programs can support intergenerational learning and equip parents to become informed partners in fostering safe, responsible, and constructive engagement with AI. Experiences from the Youth IGF initiatives and other multistakeholder initiatives demonstrate the value of participatory and intergenerational approaches that connect young people, families, educators, policymakers, and civil society. These experiences suggest that AI literacy and youth empowerment are most effective when embedded within broader community ecosystems and supported through inclusive multilateral spaces that enable dialogue, peer learning, and co-creation. Just as the Internet Governance Forum created spaces for multistakeholder dialogue on the Internet, emerging AI governance processes have an opportunity to foster intergenerational and community-centered participation, ensuring that families and communities become partners in shaping trustworthy and inclusive AI ecosystems. Such approaches can help ensure that young people and their communities are not merely recipients of AI technologies and policies, but active contributors to their development, governance, and responsible use.
Africa’s cultural and linguistic diversity is one of its greatest strengths, yet it remains underrepresented in AI development. Many AI systems are trained on datasets that reflect experiences and perspectives from outside the continent, limiting the representation of African languages and indigenous knowledge. This affects inclusion, identity, and digital sovereignty.
Empowering Africa’s youth requires AI systems that reflect local realities. Investments in local-language datasets, culturally relevant applications, and African-led research can foster more inclusive and contextually appropriate technologies. Rather than homogenizing cultures, AI should be harnessed to preserve linguistic diversity, amplify local knowledge, and drive cultural innovation.
AI inclusion in Africa is inseparable from economic realities. For many young Africans, the key question is not whether AI will replace jobs, but whether it will create new opportunities for meaningful economic participation. While AI is generating demand for new skills and opening opportunities across entrepreneurship, digital services, agriculture, healthcare, education, and software development, access to these opportunities remains uneven between and within countries.
Limited access to devices, meaningful connectivity, quality education, and training risks widening existing inequalities. Empowering youth therefore requires investments in affordable meaningful connectivity, digital infrastructure, workforce development, innovation ecosystems, and entrepreneurship. AI governance must address not only risks but also economic inclusion and opportunity creation.
Across the continent, leadership in AI ethics, data governance, and digital rights is growing, supported by organizations advancing research on accountability, privacy, and algorithmic fairness. Countries such as Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria, and South Africa are developing national AI strategies focused on inclusive growth and responsible innovation, while the African Union is advancing continental frameworks that position AI as both a development opportunity and a governance priority. The continent is also strengthening its AI talent ecosystem and advancing African language technologies and digital inclusion through initiatives such as Masakhane. In innovation hubs including Nairobi, Lagos, Kigali, Cape Town, and Accra, young entrepreneurs are applying AI across agriculture, healthcare, education, financial services, and climate resilience, demonstrating that African youth are active contributors to global AI development.
Despite this progress, there is less attention to the everyday social institutions that shape how young people engage with AI. Critical areas remain underdeveloped, including AI literacy for school-aged children, teacher training in AI and digital citizenship, parent-focused digital literacy programs, child-centered AI governance frameworks, meaningful youth participation in policymaking, large-scale investment in African language AI systems; and stronger coordination between AI governance and education policy. Strengthening these foundations is essential for truly inclusive AI empowerment for the African youth.
As earlier noted, the central ask from the UNGDAI is to place youth empowerment at the core of AI governance. Africa’s demographic, digital, and cultural assets present significant opportunities not only for the continent that needs to create decent economic opportunities at scale, but also for the global AI ecosystem. With targeted investments in education, skills, and innovation; Africa’s young population can become a leading source of AI talent, entrepreneurship, and technological creativity. At the same time, the continent’s linguistic and cultural diversity offers pathways for developing more inclusive AI systems through local language technologies and the preservation of indigenous knowledge.
Realizing this potential requires treating AI as a social, educational, cultural, and economic development priority. Alongside efforts on AI safety, security, and trustworthiness, equal attention should be given to inclusion, skills development, local innovation ecosystems, and meaningful youth participation in decision-making. These priorities align with two of the UNGDAI thematic pillars: AI Opportunities and Implications; and Bridging AI Divides: Capacity-Building, Access, and Digital Foundations.
Under the AI Opportunities and Implications pillar, empowering young Africans to become innovators, entrepreneurs, researchers, policymakers, and leaders is essential to unlocking AI’s developmental benefits. Strengthening the institutions that shape how young people engage with technology including schools, families, communities, cultural institutions, and economic systems will help ensure that AI applications reflect local realities and deliver inclusive outcomes. Priorities include expanding AI literacy, supporting digital parenting initiatives, advancing multilingual and culturally inclusive AI systems, promoting African-led research and innovation, and creating structured pathways for meaningful youth participation in policy processes.
Under the Bridging AI Divides pillar, closing gaps in skills, access, and digital infrastructure is fundamental to ensuring that all young Africans can participate in and benefit from the AI economy. Investments in digital skills, affordable meaningful connectivity, computing resources, and knowledge exchange are needed to build local expertise and foster broader societal readiness for AI. Strengthening schools, families, and communities as foundational institutions for digital inclusion will be critical to moving the continent from AI consumption to AI creation, rooted in African values, knowledge, and development priorities.
Ultimately, the future of AI in Africa will be determined by how effectively young people are educated, supported, represented, and connected to economic opportunities. The UNGDAI can play a catalytic role by convening partnerships among governments, academia, civil society, youth organizations, and the private sector, supported by coordinated research, financing, and knowledge exchange. Existing initiatives including national, regional, and continental Internet Governance Forums and their Youth IGF processes, Schools of Internet Governance, youth-led digital innovation hubs, AI and data science communities, and other multistakeholder networks provide strong foundations for meaningful youth engagement and capacity building that can be strengthened and scaled. Success should be measured by the extent to which they are empowered to shape, govern, and benefit from AI-driven transformation in addition to how effectively they are protected from AI-related risks. By placing young people at the center of AI opportunities and investing in the digital foundations that enable their participation, the international community can help ensure that Africa’s demographic dividend becomes a catalyst for inclusive innovation, sustainable development, and long-term prosperity.
This post is part I of ‘From Delhi to Geneva and Beyond: Civil Society Voices’ on AI Governance, a GNI series featuring civil society perspectives from across the Global Majority on the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance (UNGDAI), supported through the MAP-AI project.