The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has reignited longstanding debates over sovereignty and dependency across Africa, now rearticulated through the language of digital sovereignty. Optimism about AI's capacity to improve public services, strengthen logistics systems, and expand access to education is tempered by growing anxieties over job displacement, uneven value capture, and continued technological dependency on the US and China.
These competing and often antithetical perspectives raise fundamental questions: what does digital sovereignty actually mean in practice? And can African countries build competitive AI ecosystems without reproducing older forms of dependency through new technological infrastructures?
This analysis engages these questions by foregrounding the less examined relationship between dependency and African agency within the digital age. In particular, it scrutinises emerging calls for digital sovereignty as both a political aspiration and a strategic framework through which African states, firms, and institutions seek to reclaim technological futures, expand strategic leverage, and cultivate locally grounded technological capacity.
Simply put, digital sovereignty refers to a set of policy agendas that emphasise local data governance, domestically controlled compute capacity, the cultivation of a skilled digital workforce, and the adoption of legislation conducive to digital development. These ambitions unfold in a context where much of the digital infrastructure that underpins them remains externally financed, owned, or governed by multinational corporations headquartered in the United States, China, and Europe.
Originally published by African Business.