Making Development the Objective of AI4D Changes Everything
Academic research focuses on developing experiments around questions that appear to promise to yield interesting learnings and serendipitous discovery. Commercial research aims at a desired outcome, producing more predictable results in sacrificing, to a large extent, the possibility of unanticipated discoveries. Much of AI research is commercial, due to the very high cost of computational infrastructure and the enormous potential for short-term financial benefit from innovations. Enterprises have, to some extent, permitted some research activity to hew closer to the academic than the commercial paradigm, with their research teams contributing important open-source foundational models. This emerging hybrid academic-commercial model is pertinent for AI4D.
AI4D, like commercial research, aims to produce desired outcomes, but potentially without its profit-driven motivating force. Or not. Arguably, Africa represents the largest delta growth opportunity in the world and a real possibility of accelerated development through AI should bring with it the potential for large economic gains. Recognition of this is growing, the level of venture investment in Africa having climbed steadily, reaching $3.5B in 2023. or about 1% of total worldwide tech investment. Investment in African AI is still in its infancy, a negligible part of the $48B of venture capital that went into AI in 2023. If AI4D doesn’t aim at profit, it does aim at scale and economic transformation. Investors, social or economic, should take note.
African AI4D is research for Africa by Africans. In part, this is intended to develop capacity in African institutions but equally intended to produce better outcomes. African researchers bring a lifetime of experience in the African environment. If the on-the-ground knowledge of the research domain is a strength of AI4D, challenges in funding, infrastructure, and institutional legacy will slow progress. The 1% of worldwide venture funding going into Africa is a reasonable yardstick for estimating the level of comparative resources of every type AI4D will have available. African researchers, beyond little funding, must deal with problems such as unreliable electrical grids and frequent power cuts, internet connectivity that is both poor and expensive, inability to collaborate internationally due to exclusionary visa policies, lack of access to financial systems due to lack of the presence of services in African markets and internet geo-blocking, cost and difficulty to source goods and materials, and poor preparation and lack of support for students in research due to the weaknesses in African education, while Africa’s brain-drain continually siphons off the most promising.
A word about the sub-saharan former colonies of France, the “francophone countries”. Despite having roughly ⅓ of the continent’s population, possibly with a disproportionate share of problems, they have been getting about 1% of the investment funding going into Africa – 1% of 1% of what the world spends to fund enterprise creation.
In view of the balance between strengths and challenges, AI4D must clearly follow the “lean” model, concentrate on short-term results with visible impact that don’t cost much and are feasible only by virtue of experience on-the-ground. How can the work be made “visible”? There is no reward for “impact” in the value system of research, AI4D researchers will have difficulty having their work recognized in established scientific venues. A few may succeed in obtaining good results according to the lights of both value systems, but this will be very hard to do when AI4D researchers are competing in a marathon where resource constraints set them a mile back from the starting line. AI4D matters to Africa; it may be that we will have to create our own publications and conferences to share and promulgate our accomplishments.
AI4D is necessarily a political as well as a scientific paradigm shift. It is pan-African, an expression of a common will to develop durable African capacity to improve the lives of Africans. Borne out of international cooperation, and focused on the use of core technologies that are not African in origin, it isn’t isolationist, but it does strongly assert that imposed barriers to the scientific advancement of Africa that can lead to social and economic development must be dismantled and access afforded to investment and resources commensurate to opportunity. AI4D is not asking, it is offering. Offering to contribute to a world where Africa is not a case apart and the benefits of AI enrich everyone in ways that matter.
