The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa has begun a series of national consultations to develop a harmonized regional AI strategy across its 21 member states, part of a broader push by the bloc to align rules that support AI adoption and digital growth from Egypt in the north to Eswatini in the south.
The initiative sits within the Inclusive Digitalization in Eastern and Southern Africa (IDEA) programme, a $2.48 billion World Bank–backed initiative covering more than 15 countries in the region. Kenya hosted the opening round of consultations at a four-day workshop that began on June 29 in Nairobi. Zambia followed on July 13, and additional member states are expected to take part in the coming weeks.
The consultations are structured to deliver three outputs: a regional AI strategy, a harmonized regulatory framework for AI, and a regional action plan on digital inclusion.
“Our goal at COMESA is to harmonise policies, standards and regulations so that all member states can benefit equally from AI and other emerging technologies,” said Leonard Chitundu, COMESA’s telecommunications officer, who emphasized that policy recommendations coming out of the process are being designed to reflect national realities rather than impose top-down rules.
The move lands as regional-bloc AI harmonization has become one of the year’s dominant themes in African AI policy. In April, the East African Community adopted a Kigali declaration coordinating a regional AI strategy, a proposed Regional AI Fund and Uganda’s planned AI factory. Earlier this month, six Francophone West African countries — Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali and Senegal — adopted a shared AI governance framework designed to bridge national strategies while preserving them. COMESA’s push adds a third regional layer to that pattern, with overlapping membership: Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi sit in both COMESA and the EAC.
The economic case COMESA is making leans on figures that have become touchstones in African AI policy conversation. The African Development Bank’s Africa’s AI Productivity Gain report, published in June 2025, projected that AI could generate up to $1 trillion in additional GDP across Africa by 2035 — nearly one third of the continent’s current economic output — and create 40 million digital jobs. The same figures underpin the AfDB and UNDP’s $10 billion AI 10 Billion Initiative unveiled at the Nairobi AI Forum in April.
Realizing that upside, the AfDB argued, will depend on both broader AI adoption and greater regulatory alignment across countries — the second of which is precisely what COMESA is trying to advance.
The gap is real. According to the GIRAI 2026 report, only 15 of Africa’s 54 countries have adopted a national AI strategy. Within COMESA, the disparity is particularly pronounced: Kenya ranks among the six African countries scoring above the global average on the Responsible AI Governance Index, while many other member states remain at a much earlier stage of AI policy development. A shared regional framework, COMESA argues, could compress those differences enough for businesses and governments to adopt AI more consistently across borders — reducing the risk that a company operating across three or four COMESA markets ends up navigating three or four different regulatory environments.
Whether the consultations produce something implementable rather than aspirational will depend on how the resulting strategy binds member states. The Continental AI Strategy adopted by the African Union in 2024 provides the umbrella framework; the EAC’s Kigali declaration set a regional example; and Kenya’s own Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026, one of the continent’s most comprehensive, gives COMESA’s largest AI-policy-advanced member a template it can push toward its regional peers.
