Thinking Space

On a Tuesday morning in Johannesburg, Chenai Chair is still carrying the energy of Kigali where,  just a week earlier, she attended a Deep Learning Indaba summit—the continent’s biggest AI gathering. She is doing what she often does after major conferences: sitting quietly, sifting through the noise of the previous week, pulling out the threads worth keeping.   Her desk is scattered with notes. One pile is about Masakhane’s African Languages Hub, which she leads. Another is for My Data Rights, the feminist group she founded. The rest are everyday tasks: budgets, reports, and memos. Some people might see these as...

Introducing the members of the inaugural Africa AI Council, entrusted with leading the continent’s AI transformation. These 15 exceptional leaders bring the expertise, vision, and commitment needed to ensure Africa becomes a creator, not just a consumer, of AI technologies.

Chenai Chair joins the discussion at the World Bank’s new AI-Powered Innovation for Services Program at the Global Digital Public Infrastructure Summit. This new initiative will foster AI innovation ecosystems in emerging markets, starting in Africa to connect local innovators with partners, compute resources, localized data, and funding to scale impactful solutions across key sectors like energy, health, education, manufacturing, and agriculture.