Africa’s AI revolution has a multi-billion-dollar blind spot

Published 2 weeks, 2 days ago by akoramos

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how Africans access loans, education, content, and even healthcare, yet beneath the bright promises of “innovation” and “democratisation,” a quieter story unfolds, one that risks encoding old inequalities into our digital future.

If we do not act deliberately, AI could reproduce the same gender gaps we’ve spent decades trying to close, and it won’t just be unfair, it will be unprofitable.

AI is rapidly becoming Africa’s new economic engine. From Lagos to Nairobi, venture capital is flowing into startups that promise to leapfrog traditional infrastructure. Machine learning models are beginning to underwrite loans for the unbanked, diagnose diseases remotely, and optimise complex supply chains. The investment thesis is compelling: data-driven efficiency can unlock the continent’s massive, underserved markets.

But this economic engine has a critical design flaw: it is running on incomplete fuel.

In Africa, the data that trains AI is overwhelmingly male. Because men are more likely to own smartphones, use mobile money, and leave active digital footprints, they dominate the datasets that algorithms use to “learn” about the world. The result is not just a social equity issue; it is a massive market inefficiency. If Africa’s new digital tools cannot accurately see, value, or serve 50% of the population, they are leaving billions of dollars in economic activity on the table. The risk is most acute in fintech, the crown jewel of Africa’s tech ecosystem. Traditional banks have long ignored low-income women due to a lack of collateral. Fintechs aimed to fix this by replacing human loan officers with algorithms that predict creditworthiness based on “alternative data,” like mobile airtime purchase patterns, geolocation history, or app usage.

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