Frontier 2025
A year of breakthroughs, progress and human ingenuity towards public-benefit and human flourishing prospects
2025 reflected a growing effort to engage more seriously with the development and use of digital technologies. Researchers, policymakers, and engineers in many countries focused on building practical capacity in data, infrastructure, and skills that respond to local needs. From early steps toward continental coordination on AI to the release of new multilingual datasets, the moments highlighted here point to steady, collective progress. Rather than grand transformations, they show communities learning, experimenting, and beginning to shape how these tools can serve African priorities.
Motivation
The purpose of the list is to take an account of what has been accomplished, to highlight progress in the developing world, AI, policy, and public-interest work that is often quiet and dispersed, giving visibility and recognition to contributions that might otherwise go under the radar; people actively shape ideas, systems, and standards; and to identifying promising efforts.
The Gallery
This repository serves as a systematic synthesis of high-impact milestones across the world and focusing on Africa's AI landscape in 2025. By documenting breakthroughs in linguistic data scaling, algorithmic efficiency, and sovereign governance, the gallery provides empirical evidence of a continent-wide transition from passive technology adoption to active frontier research.
Key Aims
- 01.Data Sovereignty: Mitigating linguistic exclusion through the development of large-scale, domain-specific multilingual corpora.
- 02.Algorithmic Innovation: Advancing state-of-the-art efficiency in low-resource and high-uncertainty computational environments.
- 03.Institutional Governance: Codifying safety and ethical guardrails through unified, multi-national policy frameworks.
Anatomy of a Frontier Entry
Each entry in this gallery is evaluated through a multi-dimensional framework. We track Surprisal S(p) (the probability of the breakthrough generalizing across domains), Impact (the qualitative depth of the shift), and Theory (the narrative justification of why the milestone represents a fundamental leap for the continent).
Featured Progress
"AI-powered weather forecasts are now on Google Search, bringing high quality forecasts to people across Africa. AI models are able to perform much better than traditional weather forecasts when ground based weather data is sparse, which it is across Africa."
Global Breakthrough
AI for Pandemic Preparedness
Scientists across Africa, America, Asia, Australia, and Europe outline for the first time how AI can transform the landscape of infectious disease research and improve pandemic preparedness.
Read on ScienceDaily50 Things Going Surprisingly Well
A curated list of measurable progress, from deployed systems to foundational research breakthroughs.
State of LLMs for African Languages
Comparative analysis of African language coverage across LLMs, SLMs, and SSLMs. Identifies 42 supported languages and 23 public datasets, highlighting the 98% gap in unsupported languages and the neglect of 20 active scripts beyond Latin, Arabic, and Ge'ez.
Reveals the massive 'digital exclusion' of African languages and scripts, proving that current LLM development is leaving behind 98% of the continent's linguistic diversity.
In Development – Lauren Gilbert
Lauren Gilbert launched a new magazine dedicated to exploring how progress actually happens in the developing world. The magazine is called In Development and is available on Substack.
Progress requires a new narrative. By documenting how development actually happens on the ground, this magazine provides the intellectual framework for future breakthroughs.
African NLP Landscape: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead
In this survey, we analyze 884 research papers on NLP for African languages published over the past five years, offering a comprehensive overview of recent progress across core tasks. We identify key trends shaping the field and conclude by outlining promising directions to foster more inclusive and sustainable NLP research for African languages.
With over 2,000 languages and potentially millions of speakers, Africa represents one of the richest linguistic regions in the world. This is a promising directions to foster more inclusive and sustainable NLP research for African languages.
Epistemic Uncertainty-Driven ASR Selection
Novel active learning method achieving 27% WER relative improvement while requiring 45% less training data, introducing U-WER metric.
Makes AI training more efficient and affordable for low-resource languages, allowing high-quality speech recognition to be built with half the data usually required.
Alignment Debt Framework
Survey of 411 AI users revealing user-side burden taxonomy: Cultural/Linguistic (51.9%), Infrastructural (43.1%), Epistemic (33.8%).
Shifts the focus from model performance to the 'hidden work' African users must do to make AI useful, highlighting the need for systems that are culturally and infrastructurally aligned from the start.
Mapping Data Labour Supply Chain in Africa
First comprehensive map of Africa's content moderation industry spanning 43 countries, involving 17 major firms serving global clients.
Exposes the scale of the invisible labor force behind global AI safety, providing the evidence needed for better labor protections and fair wages for African data workers.
Weather Forecasting
AI ensemble model delivering forecasts up to 15 days ahead, outperforming ECMWF's ENS on 97.2% of targets, critical for African extreme weather.
Extreme weather events in Africa are becoming more frequent; GenCast provides the early warning systems needed to save lives and protect agriculture with unprecedented accuracy.
Swivuriso 3000-Hour Multilingual Dataset
3000-hour multilingual speech dataset covering seven South African languages across agriculture, healthcare, and general domains, addressing ASR gaps with domain-specific benchmarking.
Provides the first large-scale, domain-specific dataset for South African languages, enabling AI to work in critical sectors like agriculture and health where local language nuances are vital.
Continental AI Strategy
Africa's first unified Continental AI Strategy endorsed by 49 countries, establishing comprehensive policy framework.
Provides a unified voice for the continent in global AI governance, ensuring that African interests are represented in international policy and investment decisions.
Global AI Summit Africa Declaration
Continental summit resulting in Africa Declaration with AI Fund commitment and establishment of Africa AI Council.
Creates the institutional machinery (the AI Council and Fund) needed to turn policy into action and fund local AI innovation at scale.
Biosafety Regulatory Frameworks
Progress in navigating biosafety regulatory frameworks for genetic engineering in Africa, focusing on genome editing and gene drive technologies.
Establishes the safety guardrails for biotechnology, allowing Africa to safely harness genetic engineering for health and food security while managing ecological risks.
Extreme Poverty Reduction Data
People in extreme poverty reduced from 2.31B (1990) to 808M (2025), representing daily reduction of 117,557 people.
Provides the essential context for all technological progress: the fundamental improvement in human well-being that technology must continue to accelerate.
AI Hub for Sustainable Development
A strategic co-design platform launched by UNDP and Italy's G7 Presidency to strengthen local AI ecosystems in Africa, focusing on sovereign infrastructure, high-quality data, and local talent development.
Bridges the gap between global governance (G7) and local implementation, providing the resources needed for African nations to develop AI that specifically addresses the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while maintaining local agency.
AI-Powered Diagnostic Efficiency
New AI-powered software for disease detection in Senegal and other regions demonstrated a 20% increase in diagnostic efficiency during 2025 trials, marking a significant leap in precision medicine.
Demonstrates the tangible impact of AI on healthcare outcomes, specifically in precision medicine, allowing for faster and more accurate disease detection in resource-constrained environments.
Rwanda-Anthropic AI Education Partnership
The Rwandan government partnered with Anthropic to integrate AI into education, focusing on developing local talent and ensuring responsible AI adoption in schools.
Represents a strategic shift where governments proactively partner with frontier AI labs to build human capital, ensuring that the next generation is equipped to lead in an AI-driven economy.
AI-powered weather forecasts on Google Search
Bringing high quality forecasts to people across Africa. AI models perform much better than traditional forecasts when ground based weather data is sparse.
Jeff Dean: 'AI-powered weather forecasts are now on Google Search, bringing high quality forecasts to people across Africa. AI models are able to perform much better than traditional weather forecasts when ground based weather data is sparse, which it is across Africa (North America has 291 radar facilities to track weather, while Africa has 37).'
AI for Pandemic Preparedness
Scientists outline how AI can transform infectious disease research and improve pandemic preparedness globally.
Scientists across Africa, America, Asia, Australia, and Europe outline for the first time how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can transform the landscape of infectious disease research and improve pandemic preparedness.
Conversational AI and Political knowledge
Study on how conversational AI affects political information and misinformation.
Subliminal Learning
Results show that narrow finetuning can lead to unpredictable broad generalization, including both misalignment and backdoors. Such generalization may be difficult to avoid by filtering out suspicious data
Mattei Plan for Africa:
Italy's G7 presidency made Africa a central pillar, fostering new investments and partnerships through initiatives that align with Africa's development goals while addressing global challenges
Solving Data Scarcity in Africa
Thematic data challenges to create local datasets.
The Future of Open Human Feedback
Experts assess the opportunities and challenges to realizing an open ecosystem of human feedback for artificial intelligence. We
Good Faith Design
Frameworks integrating values in AI system design.
Cross-lingual reasoning for multilingual AI
Enables reasoning in underrepresented African languages.
AI Safety Assurance for Automated Vehicles
Methods for verifying AI behavior in critical systems.
Scaling Human Judgment in Community Notes with LLMs
This paper describes how such a system can work, its benefits, key new risks and challenges it introduces, and a research agenda to solve those challenges and realize the potential of this approach.
AI Talent Readiness Index for Africa 2025
The AI Talent Readiness Index—a framework measuring the continent’s capacity to cultivate AI skills through education—reveals a stark gap
With 60% of Africans under 25, achieving 15% AI literacy means equipping 200 million youth with foundational AI skills. By prioritizing hyper-local ownership over imported solutions, these strategies aim to transform 200 million youth from passive users into architects of Africa’s AI future, proving innovation thrives when rooted in context, not dominance.
DSNP Governance Framework v1
Published framework for decentralized digital identity governance.
AI Diffusion (Microsoft)
AI use in the Global North is roughly double that in the Global South. Without focused effort, this gap will define who benefits from AI for decades to come
Data Commons Africa Contributions
Datasets actively curated for AI research and local development applications.
Electrifying African firms for growth and development
Ken Opalo's series on why (energy) poverty is not a viable climate strategy in the developing world; how to electrify African economies for growth and development, on the need to invest in growing the size and productivity of African firms
Basic electricity access is not a silver bullet for productivity, but it is a powerful catalyst for human capital development. Reliable lighting extends the productive day, allowing students to study after dark and improving literacy. Power for communication devices connects people to markets, farming techniques, and digital services. Small appliances such as fans and refrigerators enable micro-enterprises and improve health and well-being. Without basic electricity, rural households are harder to reach with development programs, harder to transact with, and more vulnerable to the cycle of poverty. Leaving poor rural households unconnected to modern energy services effectively sidelines up to half of Africa’s population from benefiting AND contributing meaningfully from the continent’s economic growth. This is neither a political or economically smart thing to do.
Bridge Systems
Bridging systems increase mutual understanding and trust across divides, creating space for productive conflict, deliberation, or cooperation.
Case studies of AI policy development in Africa
We conduct a survey of existing “readiness” assessments both for general digital adoption and AI policy in particular
Embracing Abundance
Towards An Abundance Frontier For Africa.
An AI Evaluation Framework for the Development Sector
Evaluations of AI applications can help address these challenges, but the term “evaluation” is often used loosely within AI contexts, making it difficult to determine what specific questions should be asked at each stage of application development and implementation.
Healing Through Data
How Digital Public Infrastructure is Reshaping Healthcare in Africa
Africa’s AI factory
Only 5% of Africa’s AI talent has access to the computational resources needed for complex tasks.
Tiny AI-powered eye implant helps the blind see again
The chip, powered by light and paired with AR glasses, sends visual data directly to the brain. In clinical trials, most participants regained enough sight to read words and navigate daily life. This innovation represents a leap forward in artificial vision and patient independence.
Regional AI Ethics Workshops
Held in Pretoria, Lusaka, Accra to train policymakers on safe AI deployment.
African AI Safety Dialogue Reports
Published summaries of policy recommendations, multilingual data ethics, and governance measures.
Fairwork & Data Labour in Africa
Completed in Namibia, Kenya, South Africa
Continental Ethical AI Guidelines
Published by AU task force; adopted in pilot programs.
AfriStereo Dataset
Real deployment for benchmarking AI bias in African languages.
Local Language Corpora Releases
Multilingual datasets in Thai, Swahili, Yoruba actively curated.
Challenges to biobanking in LMICs during pandemics
Time to reconceptualise research ethics guidance for pandemics and public health emergencies
Human Climate Horizons & Risk
Human Climate Horizons (HCH) data platform by the UNDP warns that climate change is set to dramatically undermine agricultural productivity, with some of the greatest risks concentrated in countries least able to adapt.
Applied AI for Food Security Models
A literature synthesis, real-world applications and regulatory frameworks
GDPval
Evaluating AI Model Performance on Real-World Economically Valuable Tasks
The Perspective API
On the world wide web, toxic content detectors are a crucial line of defense against potentially hateful and offensive messages. As such, building highly effective classifiers that enable a safer internet is an important research area.
Unearthing Spatial Inequities
According to MIT Technology Review, Raesetje Sefala, a 28-year-old researcher from Limpopo, South Africa, is at the forefront of using AI and satellite imagery to combat spatial apartheid.
AI model for diabetic retinopathy screening
AI is making eyesight-saving care more accessible in resource-constrained settings
AI-driven epidemic intelligence
AI-driven epidemic intelligence: the future of outbreak detection and response
Abundance & Growth
We support efforts to accelerate economic growth, boost technological progress, and reduce unnecessary obstacles to prosperity, primarily in the United States
AI Glossary for African Languages
A tool for user education and pushes the standardization conversation in the right direction for 266M speakers of the 4 languages within the continent and beyond (Swahili - 200M, isiZulu - 28M, isiXhosa - 21M, Afrikaans - 17.2M).
Health Chatbots in African Languages
Deployed in pilot hospitals; logs and evaluations published.
A Study of Accessibility Practices in the Global South
Blind and low-vision individuals in the Global South are disproportionately affected, as only 40% of the evaluated websites meet critical accessibility guidelines.
The effects of tutoring on children’s learning outcomes in Nigeria
Real classroom interventions and assessment data.
Hainikoye agent for herders in the Sahel
The tech that helps these herders navigate drought, war, and extremists
A multi-species genomics foundation model InstaDeep
Large scale training: pre-trained with genomes from 100,000 species and refined with more than 16,000 genomics tracks across 2,700 tissues.
Localized Health Dataset Curation
Fully published datasets for AI medical research.
Strengthening vaccine capacity building on the African continent
The African Union (AU) has set an ambitious goal to strengthen primary health care systems on the African continent and achieve universal health coverage for all African citizens by 2030. As part of this initiative, the AU advocates for African self-reliance in the manufacturing of life-saving vaccines and drugs
Cultural Alignment
Cultural alignment should be reframed as a bidirectional process: rather than merely imposing standardized values on AIs, we should query the human cultural values most relevant to each AI-based system and align it to these values through interaction frameworks shaped by human users.
The Migration Opportunity
Stories and insights from the emerging field of “migration for impact.” Envisioning a world where people in need can safely and legally access better lives and livelihoods across borders if they want to.
International Joint AI Safety Testing
Jointly conducted by participants across the International Network, including representatives from Singapore, Japan, Australia, Canada, European Commission, France, Kenya, South Korea and the United Kingdom.
Policy Impact Studies
Measured influence of AI deployment on local governance decisions.
Licensing African Datasets
Equitable Open Data Licensing. Licensing for Inclusive Data Society(LIDS)
Key Findings
Synthesizing the patterns and breakthroughs from the 2025 frontier.
Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty
AI in the Physical World
Governance & Human Capital
Call for Contributions
This list is a living document of progress. If you are working on something that belongs here, or know of a breakthrough we missed, we want to hear from you.
jonas@equiano.instituteThe Landscape of Impact
Visualizing the frontier by mapping Surprisal (unexpectedness) against Impact Magnitude. The top-right quadrant represents the "Frontier Edge"—high surprise, high impact breakthroughs.