Kenya and France reaffirmed a commitment to help young African researchers turn AI research into businesses and jobs, extending a bilateral programme designed to close the gap between the continent’s scientific output and its high-skilled digital employment.
The commitment was formalized on July 14 by Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Foreign and Diaspora Affairs, Musalia Mudavadi, during Kenya-France Youth Innovation Day. The two governments pledged deeper cooperation on innovation, education, scientific research and youth entrepreneurship, framing the shared goal as expanding career opportunities for young people while building long-term collaborative initiatives.
The renewed commitment builds on agreements reached two months earlier during the Africa Forward Summit, co-hosted by Kenya and France in Nairobi and best known on iAfrica for hosting the launch of the Lawyers Hub–Agence Française de Développement report calling for a reset of Africa-Europe AI governance cooperation. That summit also launched the Africa Forward AI Clusters — a network of innovation hubs pairing AI training with entrepreneurship support.
Under the programme, researchers first take part in a boot camp before entering a Research-to-Venture phase intended to transform research projects into commercial startups. France’s General Secretariat for Investment (SGPI) says letters of intent have now been signed with six countries: Kenya, Benin, Ghana, Morocco, Egypt and South Africa — a spread that covers three of the continent’s largest francophone economies alongside its most active anglophone AI markets.
At the technical core sits a dedicated programme to develop African large language models, backed by €1.9 million (about $2.2 million). The pilot brings together French Tech Nairobi and Kenyan digital innovation firm Qhala, which is overseeing technical coordination. Qhala’s positioning as coordinator is notable: the firm, led by chief executive Shikoh Gitau, is already anchoring several of Kenya’s most consequential AI infrastructure efforts — including the Qubit Hub AI research lab launched in May with Amini, Angani and iXAfrica at the NBOX1 data centre in Nairobi, and the Kenya AI for Disability project delivered with Huawei and the Kenya Institute of Special Education.
The SGPI framed the Africa Forward AI Clusters as an attempt to bridge what it described as a structural “valley of death” separating African scientific talent from commercial success. Many young graduates across the continent, it argued, still struggle to access high-skilled digital jobs despite growing research capacity — a pattern the initiative attempts to correct by pushing capital and mentorship into the space between an academic project and a viable venture.
The Kenyan side of that challenge is significant. Youth unemployment for people aged 15 to 24 in Kenya reached 15.2% in 2025, according to World Bank data cited in the source — a figure that has increasingly framed government messaging around AI as an employment strategy, not only an industrial one.
The July commitment also lands inside a broader Kenyan diplomatic pattern. Mudavadi’s Foreign Affairs office has been anchoring successive AI partnership talks over the past two months, including expanded engagement with Microsoft, the OpenAI academy discussions, US Embassy and AmCham talks on data governance, and now the extended cooperation with France. The Africa Forward AI Clusters programme, if it moves from letters of intent to funded deployments across the six named countries, would give Kenya’s AI diplomacy a concrete continental delivery vehicle to point to.
