In February 2026, the Government of Kenya tabled an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bill. The bill was preceded by the National AI Strategy of 2025. That makes Kenya the second African state, after Ethiopia, to officially launch a legislative process towards an AI law. Of course, other African countries such as Morocco, Egypt and Nigeria are already mulling the idea of AI legislation. This is part of a recent trend in Africa where policymakers are turning attention from unchecked enthusiasm about AI to reckoning with the imperatives of governing AI risks.<\/p>\n
Be it bias, discrimination, invasion of privacy, environmental degradation or loss of jobs,\u00a0 unchecked deployment of AI poses many risks. This has prompted a range of governance initiatives in Africa. But AI strategies have been the principal means of governance considered by African policy makers. From the first national AI strategy of AI in Mauritius in 2018, over a dozen African states have adopted national AI policies of some sort. At the continental level, the African Union has an AI Strategy as well as African Digital Compact and Africa AI Declaration. An archetypal AI strategy would identify priority sectors where AI would be deployed. As a national policy plan, an AI strategy indicates the priorities and aspirations in achieving certain policy objectives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That means an AI strategy is simply a prelude to formal governance instruments such as legislation. This reinforces the recent turn to legislation from AI strategies in several African states. A common thread in recent legislative exercises is that African states tend to pursue the European Union\u2019s approach to AI governance. But the question of whether Africans need esoteric AI legislation to govern AI systems remains. If such legislation is desirable, whether Africa should go down the path of European law is not clear.\u00a0<\/p>\n
AI legislation may indeed be useful in various ways. At one level, it may regulate the development and use of AI systems that pose risks to individual rights, social cohesion or even national security as well as harnessing benefits of AI. Similar to the European approach, emergent AI bills in Africa ban certain AI systems while putting in place a series of regulatory requirements for others. Legislation can also create new regulatory bodies that oversee AI rules or other pertinent laws such as data protection or cybersecurity law. Kenya\u2019s AI Bill, for instance, institutes the AI Commissioner as well as the AI Advisory Committee as regulators of AI systems in the country.<\/p>\n
The question of whether Africa needs AI legislation at this particular moment deserves more critical scrutiny than the current enthusiasm for lawmaking might suggest. AI policies were meant to coordinate AI development at national level. While many countries committed to responsible AI development, many have yet to set up or fund institutions that were to give the strategies meaning. This points to an endemic problem in Africa where many of the challenges are not because of a lack of regulation, but because of lack of implementation. Legislating in this environment risks producing laws that are aspirational in the same way that the strategies before them were aspirational: formally enacted but substantively inert.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Emerging legislation also seems to be heavily drawn from the European Union, adopting its risk-based approach, regulatory categories and institutional design. This approach is not however new in African states\u2019 attempt to regulate new and emerging technologies. The first generation of data protection and cybercrime laws in Africa drew directly from formative legal instruments in Europe. But rarely have such legal transplanting exercises been informed by or take into account local context, interests and concerns. If Kenya and Ethiopia\u2019s recently unveiled AI bills are any indication, a similar approach of unimaginative legal transplantation is poised to shape the structure of AI regulation in Africa.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If African states are to introduce AI legislation, it should emerge not from a compulsion to signal regulatory modernity\u00a0 but from a concrete and honest reckoning with what AI is actually doing on the continent \u2014 how it is being deployed by technology companies as well as in public services, who controls the data, who bears the harms, and whose interests existing governance gaps leave unprotected. It means asking why large technology companies,\u00a0 many of them headquartered in the United States, China, or Europe, are able to collect and process vast amounts of data generated by African users, often under terms of service that most users neither read nor meaningfully consent to, and with little accountability to African regulators. It means asking why AI-powered content moderation systems perform poorly in African languages and local contexts, with real consequences for how information and misinformation spread on the continent. It means asking who benefits when governments deploy AI in social protection, policing, or public administration,\u00a0 and who bears the risk when those systems get it wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As the AI hype continues, African states are already deploying AI in different sectors, including in healthcare and tax management. But this occurs in a regulatory vacuum. In the absence of a robust regulatory regime, AI is likely to cause considerable harm to individuals and broadly on societies in the continent. While AI legislation might be\u00a0 a promising step forward in filling the regulatory void, this effort appears to be restricted only to a few countries whose approach is yet to move past European parameters. Policymakers should rather prioritise pursuing a more considered and contextualised approach to address AI risks meaningfully. Until such time, putting a moratorium on the deployment of high-risk AI systems in sensitive domains such as healthcare should be seriously considered to prevent disastrous outcomes in the years to come.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0Kinfe Yima (PhD) is a senior lecturer at University of Leeds, School of Law. Grace Mutung\u2019u is a digital policy researcher based in Kenya.<\/em><\/p>\n Contributed by Kinfe Yilma (PhD) and Grace Mutung\u2019u<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In February 2026, the Government of Kenya tabled an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bill. The bill was preceded by the National AI Strategy of 2025. That makes Kenya the second African state, after Ethiopia, to officially launch a legislative process towards an AI law. Of course, other African countries such as Morocco, Egypt and Nigeria are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"editor_plus_copied_stylings":"{}","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1932],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-50580","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-speak-your-mind"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50581,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50580\/revisions\/50581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thereporterethiopia.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}