Africa's approach to artificial intelligence governance must move beyond technical fairness to address deeper questions of power, ownership, and development. While global AI ethics discussions focus heavily on transparency, accountability, and bias reduction, experts argue these principles alone cannot address the structural inequalities that shape how AI is deployed across the African continent.

Why Is Fairness Not Enough for Africa's AI Future?

The distinction between fairness and justice in AI governance reveals a critical gap in how the continent approaches technology policy. A fairness-centered approach typically asks whether an AI system treats similar cases similarly or reduces measurable bias. A justice-centered approach asks fundamentally different questions: who develops the technology, who owns the infrastructure, who controls the data, who captures the value, and who is excluded from participation.

For Africa, this difference matters enormously. The continent is adopting AI within an already unequal global digital order where 118 countries remain excluded from major initiatives shaping AI governance globally, despite being directly affected by its outcomes. Many of those excluded nations are in Africa, where states still depend on imported technologies, external platforms, and infrastructure they do not fully control.

The problem runs deeper than algorithmic bias. Research ICT Africa's Africa Just AI programme has identified that risks associated with AI arise from the conditions under which it is produced and deployed. These include questions about who has access to computational infrastructure, whose knowledge is represented in training data, and who has the ability to influence standards and regulation.

What Are the Real Stakes of AI Deployment in African Cities?

Urban environments across Africa present a particularly urgent case for justice-oriented AI governance. Cities are not neutral spaces; they reflect histories of exclusion, uneven development, and unequal access to land, housing, transport, and services. When AI is introduced into these environments without a justice-oriented governance framework, it may simply automate existing patterns of exclusion.

Governments in African cities are increasingly exploring AI applications in land administration, transport systems, service delivery, and urban planning. While AI can help improve efficiency, it can also deepen spatial and social inequalities if deployed in settings where access is uneven and institutional safeguards are limited. A system that appears efficient may still reproduce unfair outcomes if it is built on unequal data, biased assumptions, or weak institutional oversight.

The underlying infrastructure matters as much as the algorithms themselves. AI depends on electricity, data connectivity, cloud systems, institutional capacity, and reliable public services. If those foundations are weak, AI will not produce broad social benefit, no matter how sophisticated the algorithms may be.

How to Build Justice-Centered AI Governance in Africa

• Prioritize African Participation: Ensure that African researchers, regulators, and innovators are represented in the spaces where global AI norms and standards are decided, rather than having frameworks shaped by external priorities applied retroactively to African contexts.
• Question Imported Models: Adapt, question, and where necessary rework governance frameworks designed in other settings rather than simply importing them wholesale, ensuring they reflect Africa's own legal, economic, linguistic, and social realities.
• Evaluate Public Value: Assess whether AI expands opportunity, strengthens institutions, supports inclusive development, and allows African societies to shape their own digital futures, rather than treating risk management as the primary governance goal.
• Build Institutional Foundations: Strengthen the underlying digital infrastructure, institutional capacity, and public services that AI depends on, recognizing that governance should begin well before the point of technical compliance.

UNESCO's Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, adopted in 2021 by all 193 UNESCO Member States, recognizes inclusive multi-stakeholder governance as a foundational principle, not an optional feature. Yet for Africa, meaningful participation in the global structures that shape AI norms and standards remains limited.

The African Union's Continental AI Strategy, endorsed by the AU Executive Council in Accra in July 2024, already charts a direction toward this approach. It frames AI governance around inclusive digital transformation, human capital development, and continental agency rather than external compliance, setting out a roadmap built on Africa's own developmental priorities.

What Does a Justice-Based Standard Actually Mean?

A justice-based approach to AI governance sets a higher standard than avoiding harm. It asks whether AI helps expand access, improve public institutions, and support more equitable forms of development. This standard recognizes that the deeper question is not only whether AI systems are fair in a technical sense, but whether they will reinforce existing inequalities or help correct them.

The imbalance in global AI governance has real consequences. If African institutions are only users of AI rather than active shapers of it, the continent risks becoming a passive consumer of technologies that do not reflect its own priorities. Governance frameworks developed elsewhere may address certain technical risks, but they may not adequately address structural questions of development, access, and power.

Justice, therefore, becomes more than a moral ideal. It becomes a necessary framework for evaluating whether AI is serving African societies or simply reproducing dependency in a new form. For Africa to shape its own digital future, governance must begin with this fundamental question of power and participation, not end with it.