Electricity, internet gaps hinder AI adoption in Africa

Morning in Buéa, southwest Cameroon. Harisu Fanyui is here to check on his maize crop.

The leaves are turning yellow, and the stalks are struggling to develop. Thanks to his artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered farm app installed on his mobile phone, he can quickly detect the cause of the problem and carry out an intervention.

“It's mainly about helping African farmers improve their productivity by helping them identify crop diseases on their different farms," said Fanyui, a software engineer and co-founder of the Farmer Guide app.

While diagnosing farm problems using AI is possible in Buéa, this is not the case for neighboring towns, which suffer from zero internet penetration and poor electrification.

In remote villages, many farmers cannot benefit from Fanyui's technology due to infrastructure gaps.

The challenge of access to AI in remote areas of the continent was the subject of the International Government Communication Forum in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

The meeting focused on the challenges of Artificial Intelligence as a medium of communication between governments, people and the media, with a particular impact on the development of AI-related infrastructure.

“When you work on how to develop your intelligence infrastructure, including the network, the internet, the devices, the electricity, it's the infrastructure that we need and whatmatters. Once this infrastructure is in place, we can say that it's possible to adapt certain AI tools and applications. But how can you develop AI while continuing to work on 3G or 2G?," wondered Dr. Mohamed Abdel Zaher, CEO of Artificial Intelligence Journalism for Research and Forecasting (AIJRF).

Africa's digital infrastructure gap remains significant with an estimated 900 million people still not connected to the internet. About the same number does not have access to electricity.