AI Tools Need Human Expertise; African Leaders Chart New Path Forward

PROFESSOR CHARTS PATH FOR AFRICA’S ROLE IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE REVOLUTION

The sound of a clay pot tells a story. In Duthuni village, in the Tshivhasa region of Venda in South Africa’s Limpopo Province, a master potter and mat weaver named Tshilidzi Marwala’s grandmother would tap her creations with practiced precision, listening intently to the acoustic feedback that revealed whether her work was structurally sound. That early exposure to materials science, design discipline, and the marriage of intuition with technical knowledge shaped how one of Africa’s most prominent artificial intelligence researchers now thinks about machines, human judgment, and the continent’s future in the digital age.

“She was, in every sense, except for the credentials, an engineer, and she taught me about materials, precision, and design before I ever set foot in a classroom,” Marwala recalls. Today, as the seventh Rector of the United Nations University and a UN Under-Secretary-General, he brings that same integration of practical wisdom and rigorous thinking to his work as a leading continental voice on AI development and governance.

What drew Marwala to artificial intelligence was the intellectual puzzle at its core: neural networks and the engineering challenge of building machines capable of making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. That problem sits at the intersection of three domains, he explains, engineering, economics, and philosophy, each demanding different ways of thinking about risk, value, and choice.

His research has centered on a principle that distinguishes his approach from much of the global AI conversation. “My research has focused on developing rational machines while ensuring that human oversight remains essential, since AI does not eliminate the need for human judgment,” he states. That conviction shapes how he views the continent’s relationship to the technology itself.

Marwala is explicit about the stakes. Africa, he argues, cannot afford to be a passive consumer of artificial intelligence systems designed and controlled elsewhere. “That is tantamount to cyber-colonization, where the continent again ends up a rule-taker in a revolution it didn’t help design.” The framing is direct and carries historical weight, invoking the pattern of technological dependence that has constrained African agency in previous digital transitions.

Yet he does not characterize the situation as hopeless. The continent possesses material and institutional assets that are often overlooked in global AI discussions. Demographic weight, emerging compute and data initiatives, the African Union’s Continental AI Strategy, and diplomatic standing within multilateral institutions like the UN all represent leverage points that Africa can activate if it chooses to do so deliberately.

The path forward, in Marwala’s view, requires three coordinated steps. First, Africa must invest in African-owned data and compute infrastructure, ensuring that the value generated by these foundational resources does not flow entirely to external actors. Second, the continent needs to build AI talent and research capacity at scale, primarily through universities that can train the next generation of African researchers and practitioners. Third, and perhaps most politically significant, Africa must participate substantively in global governance forums where AI rules and standards are being negotiated, rather than allowing those decisions to be made primarily among a handful of AI-producing states.

The underlying optimism in Marwala’s vision rests on a specific possibility. “What excites me is the possibility that, if we act deliberately, AI can narrow rather than widen global inequality,” he says. That framing inverts the dominant narrative of technological disruption, which often assumes that innovation will deepen existing disparities unless actively countered. For Marwala, the outcome depends on choices made now, particularly about who controls the infrastructure, who builds the capacity, and who shapes the governance frameworks. More on this perspective can be found at https://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2026/08/13/ai-does-not-eliminate-the-need-for-human-judgment/.

The argument is neither utopian nor passive. It demands that African institutions, governments, and researchers recognize the window of opportunity that exists before AI architectures and governance structures become locked in place globally, and that they move with intention to secure the continent’s stake in both the technology and the rules that will govern it. Whether those institutions can coordinate quickly enough, before the architecture solidifies around decisions made elsewhere, is the question that will define the continent’s position in the next phase of the digital age.