The Interstate AI Policy Playbook

The Interstate AI Policy Playbook

Africa’s Industrial AI Policy Playbook: Cross-National & Small Island Developing States AI Strategy

Executive Summary

Africa has seen a remarkable rise in national AI strategies, with 15 countries formally adopting frameworks¹. The African Union's Continental AI Strategy stands out for its foresight, anticipating continental coordination, regional harmonization, and ethical governance needs. It sets a benchmark for pan-African AI development, offering a vision that transcends individual national agendas². Despite strategic proliferation, implementation remains a challenge. Most available strategies emphasize infrastructure readiness, talent pipelines, and regulatory aspirations, yet provide limited guidance on societal resilience, capacity engineering, resource constraints and execution.

Towards Diffusion Readiness

AI adoption exhibits a pronounced global divide: countries in the Global North record adoption rates roughly double those in the Global South, with averages around 23% versus 13% of the working‑age population using AI tools respectively, and the gap is most acute in nations where GDP per capita is below $20,000³. Adoption is lowest in parts of Sub‑Saharan Africa and South Asia, where usage often remains below 10%, and highest in countries such as the UAE and Singapore with sustained investment in digital infrastructure. This uneven diffusion reflects disparities in foundational building blocks: reliable electricity, data centres, internet connectivity, and digital and AI skills, as well as language accessibility that determines who can use and shape AI systems⁴.

Africa's Pacing Problem

African AI governance confronts a structural pacing problem: policy institutions designed for stability must now govern technologies that compound exponentially. The Malabo Convention on Cybersecurity required nine years to enter force (2014-2023)—a timeline that would render any AI framework obsolete before implementation⁵. This Policy Playbook is a pacing-problem response to contemporary AI strategies: rather than attempting comprehensive regulation of rapidly evolving systems, it focuses on building institutional capacity for continuous adaptation—governance mechanisms that learn and adjust as fast as the technologies they govern⁶.

The Playbook: Towards Action Oriented Resilience

Africa's AI strategies articulate ambitious aspirations, but vision alone is insufficient. The playbook bridges the gap between strategy and action, translating AU foresight into operational pathways while minimizing resource duplication and enhancing policy adoption. By emphasizing capacity engineering, addressing diffusion risks, and prioritizing societal resilience, Africa can design, deploy, and govern AI systems according to its own priorities, ensuring inclusive and transformative impact across the continent.

The distance between policy document and operational reality has consumed countless continental strategies. This Playbook acknowledges that constraint explicitly: it prioritizes speed of learning over comprehensiveness of initial design.

This playbook bridges strategic vision and practical capacity. By consolidating AU foresight with continental coordination, it addresses the urgent pacing problem while laying the groundwork for societal resilience. Africa's AI future depends not on passive readiness but on active capacity: the ability to govern, deploy, and benefit from AI systems on African terms. Detailed programmatic interventions will be elaborated in subsequent reports, ensuring that this playbook functions as a living roadmap rather than a prescriptive blueprint.

National AI Strategies and Readiness

By 2025, AI governance moved from a niche technical topic to a central pillar of digital policy in global and African policy circles. At the multilateral level, the African Union’s Continental AI Strategy (adopted in 2024) began to filter into national planning processes, while UNESCO’s AI ethics framework and capacity-building programs provided reference points for domestic legislation and institutional design. Major partners—including the EU, UN agencies, and regional development banks—started to condition digital investment on the presence of credible national AI strategies or readiness plans⁷, aiming to harness AI for socioeconomic growth and digital transformation⁸.

However, readiness is uneven across the continent: talent shortages, limited digital infrastructure, scarce local data, and nascent governance frameworks pose significant implementation challenges.

What This Playbook Does

Africa's Industrial AI Policy Playbook articulates four intervention layers, each addressing specific governance failures:

Infrastructure Capacity Foundational systems including human capital development, ethical frameworks, and preparedness mechanisms. These establish material and institutional prerequisites for endogenous AI development.

Instrumental Capacity Tangible resources including sustainable compute infrastructure, evidence-based talent retention strategies, and mechanisms that redirect AI toward high-social-value applications in agriculture and public health.

Regional Innovation Coordinated research infrastructure that pools fragmented capacity for transformative research at a regional scale.

Policy Capacity Rapid-cycle governance mechanisms that transform institutions from reactive regulation to adaptive learning systems.

Each layer operates independently but achieves maximum impact through coordination.

What This Document Is Not

This Playbook does not provide:

National strategy blueprints Individual nations require context-specific strategies addressing local institutional capacities, political economies, and development priorities. This document offers modular instruments that national strategies can incorporate selectively.

Comprehensive AI regulation Traditional regulatory frameworks (algorithmic transparency, data protection, liability regimes) remain necessary. This Playbook focuses on the governance of governance—institutional mechanisms that enable effective regulation despite technological velocity.

Each suggestion is meant to operate at a regionally in African small island developing states and member states.

References