Uganda and Africa’s digital future will be decided not by how many people get online, but by who controls the intelligence running the networks, Kenya’s Special Envoy on Technology, Ambassador Philip Thigo, has warned.
In a policy statement ahead of the Africa Forward Summit 2026 set for Nairobi this month, Mr Thigo said the gathering comes “at a defining moment where technology is no longer a sectoral issue.”
“In this age of intelligence, it determines power, agency, sovereignty, and the future of prosperity,” he wrote.
While the summit will carry a dedicated theme on artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure and innovation, Mr Thigo argued the deeper question for Africa and France is “not only how we adopt technology, but who owns the capability to shape progress.”
“For Africa, therefore, the question is no longer whether we will participate in the world’s digital transformation,” he wrote.
“The real question is whether we will participate as builders, rule-makers and co-creators, or whether we will remain consumers of systems designed elsewhere, trained on data we do not control, powered by infrastructure we do not own, and governed by standards we did not shape.”
Thigo acknowledged Africa’s gains over the past decade.
“Connectivity has expanded, especially through mobile, and mobile money has transformed financial inclusion,” he noted.
“In many countries, digital public infrastructure is improving citizens’ access to services. Vibrant innovation ecosystems across Nairobi, Lagos, Kampala, Kigali, Cairo, Dakar, Cape Town and beyond have demonstrated that African entrepreneurs can build for local realities and scale solutions with global relevance.”
But he cautioned that those milestones are not enough.
“Connectivity alone is not sovereignty, and access alone is not power,” he wrote.
“While the ICT era focused on connecting people to networks, the age of intelligence focuses on what those networks can do for economic prosperity, and therefore who owns the capability, who controls the infrastructure, who builds the models, whose data is represented, whose language is understood, and whose realities shape the outputs matters.”
For that reason, he said, the Summit “must help move Africa’s digital transformation from access to capability.”
He framed AI sovereignty as a full-stack problem. “The full AI stack matters because sovereignty is built across every layer: the data we generate and govern, the compute we can access, the energy that powers our infrastructure, the talent we develop, the models we build, the use cases we deploy, and the governance systems that give citizens confidence,” he wrote.
“If any layer of that stack is missing, sovereignty becomes rhetorical,” he warned. “If African data is extracted but not governed by African institutions, value is lost. If African languages and contexts are not represented in AI models, our realities become invisible. If African innovators cannot access affordable compute, they cannot build. And if our public institutions cannot deploy AI safely, effectively and in the public interest, we miss the opportunity to improve service delivery at scale.”
His conclusion was blunt: “No country, no region, and no people should, in this era, outsource their intelligence.”
Thigo stressed that the call is not for isolation.
“It is an opportunity for Africa to assert its sovereignty in the age of intelligence and to negotiate as an equal partner, engaging the world from a position of capability,” he wrote. “The continent is simply, but with clarity, articulating that sovereignty is about interdependence, not dependence, and leveraging partnerships that build African capacity, strengthen African institutions, and create shared value.”
He described the Africa Forward Summit as timely. Under the theme _Africa–France Partnerships for Innovation and Growth_, it lands “at a time when global technology governance is being reshaped, standards are being negotiated, data rules are being written, and AI safety frameworks are being designed.”
“Compute and cloud infrastructure are increasingly becoming geopolitical assets, and talent pipelines are becoming sources of national competitiveness,” he wrote. “Evidently, countries and regions that shape these systems today will shape the economic order of tomorrow, and Africa must be at the centre of this transformation.”
On France’s role, Amb. Thigo said Paris has been a partner “aligned with important conversations around sustainable AI, ethical governance, digital innovation and public-interest technology, including through the Paris AI Action Summit.” But he insisted the next phase “must now be practical and structural.”
“It must help build regional compute infrastructure and sovereign cloud capacity, support data centres powered by Africa’s renewable energy potential, strengthen local data ecosystems, including local language models, and advance interoperable digital public infrastructure,” he wrote.
Talent, he argued, is the shortest path to sovereignty. “Africa has the youngest population in the world, with young people already building, coding, adapting, designing and solving challenges in health, agriculture, education, climate and finance,” he wrote. “But their ambition must be matched with infrastructure, financing, research networks, market access and policy environments that allow them to compete.”
That talent must plug into scale, he added, pointing to the African Continental Free Trade Area. “The Digital Trade Protocol can provide the rules — governing how data flows, how digital services cross borders, and how platforms create value without extracting it,” he wrote. “But those rules must be written carefully, and they must be written by Africans. The risk is not that we open our market. The risk is that we open it on terms we did not set.”
Amb. Thigo framed Africa’s digital market as a strategic asset: “With 1.4 billion people, a growing middle class, expanding digital adoption, and deep entrepreneurial energy, the continent has an opportunity to scale and shape new economies, create jobs, and open opportunities for the industries of the future.” Achieving that, he said, “requires shared rules, common infrastructure, interoperable systems, and regional investment.”
He urged the Nairobi summit to deliver more than statements.
“The Nairobi Summit should therefore move beyond broad declarations of solidarity, produce concrete commitments around infrastructure, data, compute, talent, models, financing, governance, and deployment, and advance a partnership model that is practical, measurable, and anchored in mutual benefit,” he wrote.
“A meaningful Africa–France digital compact is not a communiqué,” he continued. “It is a construction plan. It finances regional compute. It funds green data centres. It builds joint research capacity. It creates talent pipelines that run in both directions. It establishes data-sharing frameworks that respect sovereignty. And it commits to African participation in global standards — because standards are not technical documents. They are the architecture of who wins.”
Amb. Thigo closed by linking technology to statecraft and economics. “Technology is not a tool of foreign policy. It is foreign policy. AI is not a driver of economic strategy. It is the economy,” he wrote. “For Africa, this means agriculture, health, education, climate resilience, financial inclusion, public services, trade, jobs and security.”
But he warned of the downside if Africa fails to build capability: “If Africa does not build its own capability, AI may deepen existing inequalities, reproduce bias at scale, make our languages invisible, and ultimately concentrate economic value elsewhere.”
“The stakes, therefore, are existential,” he wrote. “Africa cannot simply be a data source for global algorithms. The Africa Forward Summit gives us an opportunity to make that shift clear.”
Africa, he said, “comes to Nairobi not as a passive recipient of technology, but as a partner with assets, ideas, markets, talent, and ambition. This is not opposed to innovation. It is precisely what can help shape a more inclusive and humane age of intelligence.”
“The task now is to translate these values into infrastructure, investment, rules and institutions,” Mr Thigo wrote.
“Africa’s digital revolution will not be outsourced. It must be negotiated, built and owned by Africans, in partnership with those who respect our agency and share our ambition.”
