Data Flows and Colonial Regimes in Africa: A Critical Analysis of the Colonial Futurities Embedded in AI Ecosystems
📝 Abstract
This chapter seeks to frame the elemental and invisible problems of AI and big data in the African context by examining digital sites and infrastructure through the lens of power and interests. It will present reflections on how these sites are using AI recommendation algorithms to recreate new digital societies in the region, how they have the potential to propagate algorithmic colonialism and negative gender norms, and what this means for the regional sustainable development agenda. The chapter proposes adopting business models that embrace response-ability and consider the existence of alternative socio-material worlds of AI. These reflections will mainly come from ongoing discussions with Kenyan social media users in this authors’ user space talks, personal experiences and six months of active participant observations done by the authors.
💡 Analysis
This chapter seeks to frame the elemental and invisible problems of AI and big data in the African context by examining digital sites and infrastructure through the lens of power and interests. It will present reflections on how these sites are using AI recommendation algorithms to recreate new digital societies in the region, how they have the potential to propagate algorithmic colonialism and negative gender norms, and what this means for the regional sustainable development agenda. The chapter proposes adopting business models that embrace response-ability and consider the existence of alternative socio-material worlds of AI. These reflections will mainly come from ongoing discussions with Kenyan social media users in this authors’ user space talks, personal experiences and six months of active participant observations done by the authors.
📄 Content
The growing global interest, combined with rising investments in AI skilling and infrastructure development, is a key driver of the expanding landscape of AI technologies and systems across Africa. This interest has not only led to increased engagement among many Africans in conversational AI, but also to an emerging plethora of grassroots initiatives that are catalysing capacity building, local solutions, and an AI knowledge base across the continent. For instance, the Stanford AI Index (2024) showed that 24% of the Kenyan population used OpenAI ChatGPT daily, and 2025 statistics placed Kenya at the top of the global map, with over 42% using ChatGPT daily. In the continent’s markets and professional settings, Google AI-related searches have increased by over 270% in a year, highlighting increasing curiosity among the public and professionals (West 2024). At the same time, there is an emergence of local initiatives, whose agenda is to drive African developed and owned AI solutions and knowledge, e.g., Deep learning Indaba, Data science Africa, Ushahidi, and Tayarisha centre, Wits MINDS among others who are not only catalysing research-led AI development and capacity building, but are also using AI for civic advocacy across the continent, strengthening the AI knowledge co-production base (Brookings 2024), as well as exploring the AI and digital tools to enable economic and political agency, response-able digitization, and digital resilience in the continent (Ndaka, Oando & Majiwa 2024). While local innovations’ scaling is minimal due to critical under-resourcing, there is anticipation that AI may contribute over $1.2 billion to the continent’s GDP by 2030, across major sectors (Agrifocus Africa 2024). This growth in GDP will come from increased AI adoption across sectors like healthcare, education, public services and agriculture, as well as a growing diversity of startups and AI solutions in those sectors.
Despite local actors showing resilience in their quest to demonstrate Africa’s potential to build and meet the demand for context-aware AI solutions (Zimba et al., 2025), which resists an import and consumer-driven approach to AI (Ndaka 2024), there are significant gaps in addressing power dynamics. Global technology multinationals like Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and IBM have firmly entrenched themselves in the African AI ecosystem through investments in AI research relevant to them, skilling, and talent incubation (Brookings, 2024), while dominating AI debates. While these activities appear as positive investments made by big tech, the invisible activities running through the business models, e.g., online surveillance, recommendation algorithms, data scrapping, and labour extraction through proxies (BPOs) should be of concern -as they are entrenching colonial imprint through data extraction, transposed digital infrastructure and commodification of everyday social interaction through social digital spaces (Ndaka et al 2024). Worse, the government’s involvement in the hype creates a significant conflict of interest between its role as custodian of citizens and private interests (Ndaka 2017). This emphasizes what many scholars have argued in the past about technology and its investment -as a political tool that has enacted political goals for centuries (Latour 2011; Hecht 2009). These tools foreground dominant power structures, capitalist norms, and global corporate dominance (Fauset 2008). By design, they have prioritized foreign interests, compromising Africans’ ability to assert their agency in socio-material relationships that shape how AI and emerging technologies unfold in the African continent ( Major policy tools such as the SDGs and the Africa Agenda 2063 have increasingly framed AI as a development enabler, thereby centering discussions around AI development. The Continental AI strategy and multiple other national AI strategies have positioned AI as a force for Africa’s economic growth and a catalyst for equity across sectors (African Union 2024). But is this feasible? Will AI save Africa from its wicked problems?. Ndaka (2024), in her work that focuses on how Africa is assembling policies in anticipation of AI-driven techno-futures, critically highlights how current policies foreground the interests of those in power, and, by design leave out the critical voices of institutions and people in the formulation and potentially implementation. This chapter will therefore seek to frame the elemental and invisible problems of AI and big data in the African context by examining commonly used social media and search sites; Facebook, Google, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, through the lens of power and interests. It will present reflections on how these sites are using AI recommendation algorithms to recreate new digital societies in the region, how they have the potential to propagate algorithmic colonialism and negative gender norms, and what this means for the regional sustainable devel
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