Jawad Berrada

Professional with experience in finance, tech, and media across France, Morocco, and Francophone Africa. Currently Senior Product Manager at UpSlide, a fast-growing B2B SaaS startup, and Founder of Nektar, a pan-African media platform amplifying African creativity, culture and innovation through short-form video and storytelling.

Theme: Could the next Jensen Huang be African?

Abstract of Presentation

“AI is not a luxury for Africa; it is a strategic necessity to ensure the continent’s competitiveness, resilience, and long-term prosperity.” These words from Solomon Quaynor, Vice-President at the African Development Bank, capture the stakes.

As AI reshapes how we learn, work, and access healthcare, Africa faces a dual challenge: avoiding passive consumption of foreign technologies, and actively building sovereign, context-aware solutions.

Done right, AI can address local needs, create skilled jobs for Africa’s youth, and fuel long-term development.

Across Africa, a new generation of startups is rising to the challenge. Lelapa AI (South Africa) and Awarri (Nigeria) are developing large language models trained natively in African languages.

La Ruche Health (Côte d’Ivoire) uses voice-based AI to guide patients. DeepLeaf (Morocco) and Shamba Records (Kenya) apply AI to boost agricultural productivity. Since 2020, over 150 African AI startups have raised more than $800 million (as of June 2025).

Yet these innovations require key enablers: local datasets, affordable compute, robust data infrastructure, and skilled talent.

Today, Africa accounts for just 1.3% of global data center capacity, despite mobile data usage growing by 40% annually.

That gap is narrowing. The continent’s data center market is projected to double to $7 billion by 2030. Kenya is building a $1B geothermal-powered data center in Olkaria. Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa are also scaling infrastructure, leveraging renewable energy and targeted incentives.

Policy momentum is growing through regional frameworks (Malabo Convention, AU Data Policy) and national strategies supporting data sovereignty.

But the real battleground is talent. To move beyond annotation and data labeling tasks and into high-value AI roles (LLM design, chip design & manufacturing), Africa must invest massively in education and skills development.

By 2050, one in three young people globally will be African. With the right ecosystem, the next Jensen Huang or Sam Altman might just emerge from the continent.