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.

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.

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.

By Folu Adebayo

Almost thirty years ago, I held a healthy baby boy in my arms and I began to write his life.

Not on paper. In my chest. The way every mother does in those first hours, when the weight of a newborn is still strange and the future feels like something you can simply decide. We named him Akintade. And in the quiet of that hospital room, I wrote the whole story out.

I saw the first day of school. The blazer a little too big for his shoulders, the gap-toothed grin, my hand letting go of his at the gate. I saw a graduation, a gown, a name read out, a cap thrown into the air. I saw a wedding day. I saw grandchildren I would spoil and hand back sticky and overtired. I had written every chapter before he had lived a single day.

I just did not know that I was dreaming about a son who did not yet exist.

Akintade is autistic. He communicates without words.

And one by one, the chapters I had written began to be erased. The school gate I had imagined did not look the way I had pictured it. The graduation. The wedding. For a long time, I grieved each one as if it were a death. Because in a way, it was. Quietly, privately, in a grief I did not have permission to speak aloud, I mourned a future that was never going to arrive.

I want to be honest about that grief, because so many parents carry it in silence and are made to feel ashamed of it. We are told we should only feel grateful, only feel love. And we do feel those things, fiercely. But alongside them, in the early years, there was mourning. And pretending otherwise helps no parent who is sitting tonight where I once sat.

Here is what took me years to understand, and what I would give anything to tell my younger self in that hospital room.

What died was never my son. What died was the script I had written before I knew him. Those were my dreams. My expectations. I had handed a newborn a stack of plans he never asked to carry, and when life gave me a different story, I mourned my version of him as though it were a real person who had been taken away.

It was not. He was here the whole time. The real one. And the real one was never the tragedy. The tragedy existed only in the comparison, only in measuring the son I was given against the son I had invented.

The day I finally put the script down; I got my son back.

And the son I got back was worth more than every dream I had lost.

Let me tell you about the real Akintade, the one I almost missed while grieving the imaginary one. He is jovial. He communicates using Picture Exchange Communication (PECS) and Makaton signs (by the way, all of us in my household are makaton experts, thanks to Akintade) He is full of life. He has a spot on the sofa that is his, where he settles when he comes home. He loves good food. His whole face changes when Afrobeats comes on, a joy so complete and so unguarded that it puts the rest of us to shame, we who have learned to hold our happiness back.

He may never speak full sentence to me. But without a single word, this man has taught me more about human worth than anyone I have ever met. He has redrawn my understanding of what success means, of what a life is for, of how to love without condition and without expectation of return. The dreams I lost were small, ordinary, borrowed from everyone else’s idea of a good life. What he gave me instead was something I did not know to dream of.

He may never speak a sentence. But without a single word, he has changed how I understand human worth.”

I am writing this in a Nigerian paper deliberately, because I know how autism is too often spoken of among my people. In hushed tones. As shame. As something to hide, to pray away, to be ashamed of in front of relatives. I have seen families isolate these children, and I have seen the children pay the price for our silence and our fear.

So let me say it plainly, as a Nigerian mother, in a Nigerian paper. My autistic son is not a punishment. He is not a curse. He is not a lesser version of a real child. He is a whole human being, of immense worth, who has enriched my life beyond anything I could have planned. And the shame that surrounds children like him belongs not to them, but to a society that has not yet learned to see them.

This is the work I have given my life to. Becoming his voice in every room he cannot speak in. Building a centre that bears his name. And trying, in whatever way I can, to change how our people see these extraordinary children, so that the next mother holding a baby like mine is met with understanding instead of pity, and welcome instead of shame.

If you are a parent reading this tonight, sitting in the chair I once sat in, mourning a future you had already written, I want to say one thing to you.

Put the script down. Gently, and without guilt. The grief is real and you are allowed it. But do not let it keep you from the child who is actually in front of you, the real one, who has been waiting this whole time to be met as he is rather than as you imagined him.

Go and meet your actual child. You may find, as I did, that the son you were given is worth more than all the dreams you lost. A man called Akintade is here. He has changed me. And if his story changes how even one family sees their own child, then every dream I once grieved was a small price for the one I was given instead.

Folu is the mother of Akintade, a Tech Leader, founder of Tade Autism Centre, Neurohelp.ai, and ATSI Charity. She is an autism advocate working to change how autism is understood and embraced.

By Folu Adebayo

A lawyer in the United Kingdom needed to summarise a confidential client document. Forty pages. A busy day. So they did what millions of professionals around the world now do without a second thought.

They pasted it into an AI tool.

Faster than reading it line by line. Nobody had told them not to. Nobody had told them they could. There was no policy. No training.

No record of the decision.

It seemed harmless. It was not.

A UK tribunal has now ruled that uploading confidential documents to an AI tool can be treated as the equivalent of placing them in the public domain. The legal privilege protecting those documents, the confidentiality that is the very foundation of the relationship between a professional and their client was lost. Permanently.

Not because anyone acted in bad faith. Because the tool did what such tools do the moment information is entered into them.

“The employee was not trying to do anything wrong. They were trying to work faster.”

Why this matters far beyond the United Kingdom

It would be easy for African business leaders to read this as a distant story. A British tribunal. A British case. A British problem.

That would be a mistake.

The behaviour at the centre of this ruling a professional pasting confidential information into an AI tool to save time is happening in every law firm, every bank, every hospital, every government office, and every consultancy in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Johannesburg right now. Today. As you read this.

The technology does not respect borders. The behaviour does not respect borders. The risk does not respect borders.

The only thing that varies from country to country is whether there is a governance framework in place to manage it and whether the people using these tools have been told, clearly, what is and is not permitted.

In most African organisations, that framework does not yet exist.

The quiet leak

Consider what is most likely happening inside your own organisation as you read this.

A member of staff has a long report to summarise. They paste it into a free AI tool.

A colleague is drafting a difficult email and asks an AI assistant to improve the wording including the confidential context. Someone in finance uploads a spreadsheet of sensitive figures to ask the AI to analyse it. A junior employee, eager and capable, uploads a client contract to extract the key terms quickly.

None of these people are acting maliciously. Every one of them is trying to do their job well.

And every one of them may be moving confidential information client data, commercial secrets, personal information, privileged material outside the protected boundary of the organisation.

This is not a hypothetical risk. Industry research suggests that the overwhelming majority of organisations have employees using AI tools, while only a small minority have any policy governing what may be entered into them. The gap between adoption and governance is not narrowing. It is widening.

“The technology does not respect borders. Neither does the risk.”

Why Africa is particularly exposed
There are three reasons this risk is especially acute across African markets.

First, AI adoption across Africa has been rapid, mobile-first, and largely informal. Professionals have embraced AI tools with energy and ingenuity often ahead of the organisations they work for. That is a strength. But it means usage is running far ahead of governance.

Second, many African organisations do not yet have the data protection infrastructure, the internal compliance functions, or the governance frameworks that would, in other markets, provide at least some guardrails. The legal frameworks are developing , Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa have all made significant progress on data protection but the translation of law into day-to-day organisational practice remains incomplete.
Third, the consequences of a confidentiality breach are severe in any market, but in markets where trust is hard-won and reputational damage spreads quickly, the cost can be existential. A bank that leaks customer data, a law firm that loses privilege over client documents, a hospital that exposes patient information these are not recoverable inconveniences. They are breaches of the trust on which the entire business depends.

What African leaders must do now
The good news is that the solution is neither expensive nor complex. It does not require new technology. It requires leadership, clarity, and a small amount of disciplined effort.

First, establish a clear AI usage policy. A single, plain-language document that states what types of information may and may not be entered into AI tools. It does not need to be sophisticated. It needs to exist, and it needs to be communicated.

Second, train your people. Not a lengthy programme a clear, honest conversation. Most employees who create AI-related risk do so because nobody has explained the danger to them. Once they understand, the overwhelming majority adjust their behaviour immediately.

Third, create a record. The UK tribunal ruling makes clear that when accountability is tested, organisations will be expected to demonstrate that their people understood the rules. A simple, dated record showing that staff have received and acknowledged the AI usage policy is no longer an administrative nicety. It is a protection.

Fourth, lead by example. When senior leaders talk openly about responsible AI use, it gives everyone else permission to ask the questions they are currently afraid to ask.

The opportunity inside the warning
It would be easy to read this column as a reason to fear AI, or to restrict it. That is not my intention.

AI is one of the most powerful tools African professionals have ever had access to. It can close capability gaps, accelerate work, and allow small organisations to compete with much larger ones. The answer is not to ban it. The answer is to govern it.

The organisations that will thrive in the African AI economy are not the ones that move fastest or the ones that move most cautiously. They are the ones that move deliberately adopting AI with energy, and governing it with discipline.

The UK tribunal ruling is a warning. But it is a warning delivered early enough to act on. African leaders who read it, understand it, and act on it now will protect their organisations, their clients, and their reputations.

Those who treat it as someone else’s story will learn the same lesson later and at a far higher price.

The choice, as always, belongs to leadership.

Folu is AI Architect & Risk & Governance Director, United Kingdom, Founder of AIExpertsPro, and an AI governance advisor to UK and African financial institutions, and can be reached via aiexpertspro.co.uk/folu@aiexpertspro.co.uk