Artificial intelligence (AI) is potentially the most powerful tool for inclusive growth in Africa, but the continent is in a race against time and must act with urgency to overcome the risk of further inequality and the creation a digital underclass. This is according to the continent’s largest mobile operator MTN Group.

“We must be obsessed and paranoid about not being left behind,” MTN Group President and Chief Executive Officer Ralph Mupita told The Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation (KMF) Inclusive Growth Forum over the weekend.

He said Africa’s path to inclusive AI required speedy action on six fronts.

Firstly, AI needs more abundant electricity supplies to drive economic growth. The IEA has estimated that Africa’s energy and climate-related goals by 2030 require annual investments of more than US$200 billion. The International Monetary Fund has said that all data centres combined use as much power as some of the world’s largest economies, and data centre power demand may triple by 2030.

As Africa has less than 2% of global data centre capacity, Mupita said it needs to invest heavily in digital infrastructure, beyond investment in fibre and subsea cables. The International Telecommunication Union has said that Africa needs around US$96 billion until 2030 to plug the digital infrastructure capex gap.

Thirdly, Africa needs to speed up the development of its own large language models (LLM) to power AI-driven solutions for its 1.5 billion people. There are more than 2 000 distinct African languages and Mupita said that fewer than 2% of them are supported by mainstream LLMs.

He was building on comments he made in New York in September on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, when he took up a call to action from Nigeria for MTN Group to support the collection of datasets of African languages, including funding academic research into the continent’s languages.  

This followed the launch of the Nigerian Atlas for Languages & AI at Scale (N-ATLAS) – an open-source multilingual LLM designed to understand and generate Nigeria’s diverse voices and create datasets for AI solutions.

Mupita told the KMF gathering that Africa must act with urgency to develop strong digital and AI skills. “This is an opportunity to enable Africa’s rich pipeline of youth, which will make up the world’s largest workforce by 2050,” he said, adding that by 2030, there would be an estimated 230 million digital jobs in sub-Saharan Africa.

“We must ensure that new jobs and augmented jobs are greater than the jobs lost, particularly with the youth divided that Africa will have.”

Calling AI a tool to solve Africa’s unique challenges, particular in high impact sectors, Mupita said Africa needed to combine traditional AI and generative AI for the greatest value across key use cases in key sectors such as healthcare, education and agriculture.

Finally, he said if Africa was to turn its ambition into reality and create – not merely consume – AI, partnerships were essential. “To give African AI initiatives scale and joint success, governments, the private sector and civil society must partner on policy, data governance and skills development. And we must do this without delay.”