By Folu Adebayo
This week, in Geneva, something quietly historic happened. For the first time, at the mandate of the United Nations General Assembly, the world formally sat down together to decide how artificial intelligence should be governed. Governments, technology companies, scientists and civil society gathered for the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance, to confront a single, enormous question: can this technology be made to benefit all of humanity, safely and fairly, or will it benefit only a few?
I read the Secretary-General’s opening address twice, because it said, with the authority of the world’s highest office, what I have been arguing in this column for months. And it contained a warning that every African leader, and every African parent, needs to hear.
The warning that should reach every African home
The Secretary-General was blunt. Artificial intelligence, he said, is advancing at runaway speed, deployed faster than anyone, including the people building it, can keep up with. These systems are no longer simply tools awaiting our instruction. They are beginning to make choices with less and less human oversight. And our institutions, he warned, were built to govern machines that follow commands. They are not ready for machines that decide.
But it was his second warning that struck me hardest, because it is about us. The computing power, the data, and the talent behind the most advanced AI are concentrated in a handful of companies, in a handful of countries. Most nations, he observed, including many developing ones, have had no say in decisions that will shape their futures. And then a line I have not been able to put down: when power imbalances are hard-wired into technology, inequality becomes part of the code.
Read that again, slowly. Inequality becomes part of the code. Not inequality of income, which a good year can ease. Inequality built into the very systems that will run banking, healthcare, education and government for the next century. The kind of inequality that does not fade, but compounds.
| “When power imbalances are hard-wired into technology, inequality becomes part of the code.” |
The number that should shame us into action
The Secretary-General gave one figure that captures the danger precisely. Last year, private investment in AI infrastructure approached half a trillion dollars. Public investment in AI capacity for the developing world, by comparison, he called a rounding error.
Sit with that imbalance. Half a trillion dollars flowing into the systems of the already-powerful, while the nations with the most young people, the most to gain, and the most to lose, are left to watch. He warned, in words I wish every African finance minister would frame on their wall, that we cannot allow the digital divide to harden into an AI divide, and the AI divide to become a development gap, a security gap, and a sovereignty gap.
That is the whole danger for our continent in a single sentence. If we do not act, AI will not merely leave Africa behind. It will entrench our being behind, in the code itself, for generations.
And yet, the hope was real too
I would be doing the Secretary-General, and you, a disservice if I stopped at the warning. Because he did not. He turned, deliberately, to the hope, and it is the same hope that made me build what I have built.
The same technology, built with purpose, he said, is already changing lives for good. He painted the picture plainly. A mother in a rural clinic has her scan read in minutes, and her cancer caught in time. A child keeps learning beyond the classroom, with a tutor that never tires. A smallholder farmer plants with the same forecasts as the biggest agribusiness, and brings the harvest home. And then the phrase that moved me most: all of this is happening today, often in the very places the headlines rarely reach.
I know the truth of this in my own life. I built a free tool to help parents navigate the autism journey, and in a few short weeks it has reached thousands, in places and languages the headlines never mention. So when the highest office in the world says AI built with purpose can reach the forgotten, I do not hear a slogan. I hear something I have watched happen with my own eyes.
| “We cannot vibe-code the future of humanity.” — UN Secretary-General, Geneva, this week |
So, was Africa in the room?
Here is the question I cannot stop asking. The world sat down this week to decide the future of AI. Was Africa truly in the room, shaping the decision? Or merely in the building, watching others decide?
Because presence is not the same as power. It is not enough for our leaders to attend these summits and pose for the photographs. We must arrive with our own position, our own red lines, our own demands. That AI which touches African citizens is governed by rules made with African input. That our data is not simply extracted to train systems we will then rent back at a premium. That the half-a-trillion-dollar gap is named, and closed, and not politely ignored.
The Secretary-General offered one principle that should anchor every government on our continent. In every high-stakes decision, in justice, in healthcare, in policing, machines may inform, but humans must decide, and answer. When a citizen is harmed, the answer can never be that the algorithm did it. That principle is not a Western luxury. It is a protection our people need more than most, and we should demand it be built into every system that governs an African life.
The room is still open
This first Global Dialogue is a beginning, not an ending. The rules are not yet written. The gap is not yet closed. Which means the room is still open, and Africa can still walk in, not as a guest, but as an author.
But that will not happen by accident, and it will not happen through hope alone. It will happen only if our leaders treat AI governance as the sovereignty question it truly is, as serious as any question of land, currency or borders. Because in this century, the code is territory. And a continent that does not help write the rules of the technology that will govern its people has surrendered something it may never win back.
The world has sat down to decide the future of AI. I pray Africa does not merely watch. I pray we pull up a chair, open our mouths, and help write the future our children will have to live in. The room is open. Let us not waste the invitation.
