On 16 October 2026, in Shanghai, Kambale Musavuli spoke for Aether Strategies at the Global South Academic Forum. The panel, “AI and Digital Technology in the Service of the People”, met the day before the forum’s plenary sessions opened. It was the annual meeting of the forum’s working group on digital sovereignty and sovereign AI. Seven speakers from six countries took part: China, Afghanistan, Brazil, Russia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Venezuela.
Mr Musavuli brought the discussion back to the ground. In Accra, he said, people talk about feeding their families and caring for their loved ones. Yet decisions that affect them are increasingly AI-enabled and made without them.
His intervention made three points:
– Ownership of infrastructure. He cited the March 2024 undersea cable damage that cut dozens of African countries offline for weeks. When the infrastructure that will carry AI is not yours, he argued, digital sovereignty is only a phrase.
– Cyber resilience. The hacking of Ghana’s .gh domain registry was publicly disclosed by Google, not by national authorities, he said. This shows that sovereignty also depends on institutional security.
– Data as the new land. He described foreign efforts to digitise Congolese geological research and feed prospecting AI whose value is captured abroad.
Beyond AI‘s method answers these risks. It picks topics people relate to, such as “Unemployment or opportunities?” and “Who will own AI infrastructure?” It also runs free trainings in which any attendee can teach a skill. Of the pillars of sovereign AI, Mr Musavuli placed democratic accountability and participation at the core. He argued that the people a technology affects must be able to hold it to account. He also said innovation should start from human development, not from more data centres.
The panel’s conclusions matched this approach. Marcio Pochmann, president of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, described sovereignty as capacity. Without engineers, he said, laws are only typography. Shameem A. Nawber presented a BRICS study. It found that roughly 85 per cent of Global South countries run public digital workflows on foreign commercial subscriptions.
What this means for decision-makers. National AI strategies need capacity to be credible. That means infrastructure, skills, cybersecurity and accountability mechanisms. Aether advises governments, regional institutions, donors and companies on turning these priorities into decisions.
*Beyond AI is Aether Strategies’ civic platform bringing together policymakers, innovators, and citizens to shape responsible AI governance and digital transformation across the continent.
