Senior policymakers, technology executives and international institutions opened East Africa’s largest artificial intelligence summit in Nairobi on Tuesday, as the region moves to consolidate fragmented digital initiatives into a coherent strategy for AI governance and infrastructure development.
On the opening day of the three-day AI Everything Kenya × GITEX Kenya event, the Inclusive AI Everything Summit brought together more than 400 senior delegates, including cabinet ministers, regulatory officials and technology company heads, at the Sarit Expo Centre. The gathering spans representatives from Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda, as well as Cameroon, Ghana and Mozambique, a breadth organisers say signals the event’s ambition to move beyond a single-country showcase.
The summit is organised by inD, the company behind the global GITEX technology events, in partnership with Kenya’s Office of the Special Envoy on Technology. It runs until 21 May, with an expo and conference stage moving to the Kenyatta International Convention Centre on Wednesday and Thursday.
Kenya’s cabinet secretary for investments, trade and industry, Lee Kinyanjui, is among the government figures attending, alongside Philip Thigo, Kenya’s special envoy on technology and Nkundwe Mwasaga, director general of Tanzania’s ICT Commission. The African Union Commission is represented by Lerato Mataboge, its commissioner of infrastructure and energy.
Industry participants include IBM, Goldman Sachs and iXAfrica Data Centres, alongside representatives from the European Artificial Intelligence Office. The agenda centres on what organisers describe as sovereign AI — the degree to which African governments control the data, computing infrastructure and language models that underpin AI systems deployed on the continent.
“AI will not scale on ambition alone,” said Snehar Shah, chief executive of iXAfrica Data Centres. “It requires secure, resilient, high-density, well-connected, and energy-conscious infrastructure that can support cloud platforms, enterprise workloads, sovereign data, and emerging AI ecosystems.”
The event also features Winnie Mang’eni, chief executive of PAWA AI, a platform backed by Mozilla and NVIDIA that supports Swahili and other African-language speakers. The company says its tools allow governments, schools and businesses to build and run multilingual AI systems with reduced dependence on international cloud providers — a recurring concern among African policymakers wary of digital dependency.
Analysts and regional officials have long argued that East Africa risks becoming a consumer rather than a producer of AI technologies, with the economic surplus flowing predominantly to platforms and infrastructure owners based in the United States and China. The summit’s programme addresses that concern directly, with sessions on AI governance, agricultural applications, energy access, financial services and data centre investment.
Africa’s AI potential is widely cited, though the precise figures vary by methodology. Projections from several international bodies suggest the continent’s AI-related economic gains could reach into the trillions of dollars by 2030, provided the requisite infrastructure and regulatory frameworks are established in time.
For East African governments, the practical questions are more immediate: who builds and owns the data centres, on what legal terms is cross-border data shared, and how are national AI regulatory regimes made interoperable. Louis Yaw Afful, Executive Director of the AfCFTA Policy Network, is among the speakers expected to address the trade architecture underpinning those questions.
The AI Everything Kenya expo continues on Wednesday and Thursday at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre.
