by MTHULISI SIBANDA
JOHANNESBURG, (CAJ News) – AT the just-concluded annual ICT Editors Xchange, experts convened to explore how the continent is building artificial intelligence (AI) for its own realities.
The seventh edition of the event was held in Johannesburg under the theme, “Africa’s Intelligence, Africa’s Terms.”
It brought together speakers from Huawei, academia and business to examine African AI, local data, indigenous-language education and cloud infrastructure.
Charles Cheng, Huawei South Africa Deputy Chief Executive Officer, opened the event.
He said Africa should define the terms of its own intelligence rather than inherit them.
“African intelligence, African terms means systems that are trained on our realities and designed for our needs,” Cheng said.
“It means innovation that works with small businesses, schools, hospitals, researchers, entrepreneurs and public institutions,” the executive continued.
Cheng said the next chapter of Africa’s digital transformation would be driven by cloud computing, AI, connectivity, secure networks, data infrastructure and talent.
“It means ownership of the platforms and autonomy over the questions we ask, the problems we choose to solve, the data we use, the languages we include and the value we create,” Cheng said.
Digital futurist Nicky Verd delivered a keynote address titled, “The Future Belongs to the Adaptable.”
She argued that Africa’s AI advantage lay in its ability to adapt quickly rather than being constrained by legacy systems.
Citing Kodak and Nokia, Verd said the greatest risk was complacency, not technology.
She described the “Titanic mindset” of businesses that believed they were too big to sink and warned that the greater risk was personal.
“The real threat isn’t just job loss. It is becoming mentally obsolete while you are still employed,” Verd said.
Gift Lubele, founder and CEO of AuraaAfrica, emphasised that AI must be trained on African data to serve African users.
“I realised that 94 percent of all AI music models are trained on Western data. African data is 0,04 percent, not even 1 percent. If we don’t include ourselves in these AI models, we cease to exist,” he said.
AuraaAfrica recently won the Grand Innovation Prize at Huawei’s Code4Mzansi developer competition from 1 040 entries.
He challenged, “Let us move away from consumption as an African continent. Let us now be creators of data.”
Dr Olaperi Okuboyejo of the University of Pretoria explained how AI could support learning when it is delivered in the languages African students actually speak. She outlined the paradox in South African education: a record 88-percent matric pass rate and the largest-ever cohort, alongside a deep early-learning crisis.
“Eighty-one percent of Grade 4 learners in South Africa cannot read for meaning in any language,” she said.
Okuboyejo said mainstream AI tools still performed poorly in African languages and highlighted her lab’s work on indigenous-language datasets and pan-Afrikan language models.
Huawei Cloud South Africa’s Director of Cloud Solutions Sales, Calvin Huang, explained the cloud and computing layers on which African AI ambitions depend.
He traced a rapid shift from generative to agentic to physical AI, citing Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei’s view that AI may be “the last technological revolution in human society.”
Huang said the economic opportunity was equally significant, with AI investment projected to reach US$810 billion by 2028.
He said South Africa still faced challenges around deployment, cost and data sovereignty.
Huawei is addressing these challenges through open AI systems, local infrastructure and industry partnerships. Huawei’s AI infrastructure is now live in its Johannesburg region.
– CAJ News