Africa’s largest mobile operator, MTN Group, has warned that the continent risks creating a “digital underclass” if it fails to act quickly on artificial intelligence (AI).
Speaking at the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation Inclusive Growth Forum, MTN Group President and CEO Ralph Mupita described AI as the most powerful tool for inclusive growth—but said Africa must act with “paranoia and urgency” to avoid being left behind.
“We must be obsessed and paranoid about not being left behind,” Mupita said.
He outlined six priority areas for Africa’s AI readiness:
- Reliable electricity to power data centres and digital infrastructure.
- Massive investment in infrastructure, as Africa currently holds less than 2% of global data centre capacity.
- Development of local large language models (LLMs) to reflect Africa’s 2,000+ languages—less than 2% of which are supported by mainstream AI tools.
- Collection of African language datasets, building on MTN’s support for Nigeria’s N-ATLAS open-source multilingual model.
- Digital and AI skills development, leveraging Africa’s youth dividend and 230 million projected digital jobs by 2030.
- Cross-sector collaboration between governments, academia, and private industry to build scalable AI ecosystems.
Mupita said Africa must not remain a passive consumer of AI but become a creator, integrating both traditional and generative AI to address challenges in healthcare, education, and agriculture.
“To give African AI initiatives scale and joint success, governments, the private sector and civil society must partner on policy, data governance and skills development. And we must do this without delay,” he concluded.
