African Tech Leaders Push for Locally-Relevant AI Development at WATISE Summit

At a summit of West African telecommunications leaders in Lagos, a Nigerian technology executive made a case that has echoed through many postcolonial conversations in a new register: that Africa need not inherit the digital future shaped by others, but can author its own. Ejovi Aror of ipNX argued that artificial intelligence, still being defined as much as deployed, presents a rare opening for the continent to build systems rooted in local realities rather than imported assumptions. The ethical stakes are high, and so is the infrastructure gap — but the window, he insisted, is open.