The #FIFAfrica26 report, Navigating the Implications of AI on Digital Democracy in Africa, unveiled today in Mauritius 🇲🇺 studied how artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting civic space, digital rights, and democracy. It covered 14 African countries (Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe)

🛣️𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐲 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐭 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐨𝐦 𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚🛣️ 📍Third Stop: #JourneyThrough #Ethiopia 🇪🇹 The report on Ethiopia presented the paradox of #ArtificialIntelligence in a fragile state. On one hand, the government has aggressively placed AI at the heart of its #digitaltransformation, and on the other hand, these digital ambitions are unfolding in a deeply fragile sociopolitical landscape marked by armed conflict, arbitrary arrests, and a rapidly shrinking civic space. Consequently, AI acts as a double-edged sword which is offering developmental leaps while simultaneously providing new tools for #digitalauthoritarianism. Further insights include the following: 🟨With an estimated 65% of the population still offline and persistent infrastructure gaps, the rapid deployment of AI risks deepening existing inequalities. Rural communities, women, pastoralists, and persons with disabilities could be left further behind. 🟨 Generative AI, synthetic media, and deepfakes (including cloned voices of public figures) are widely used to fuel ethnic tensions, particularly in conflict-prone regions like Amhara and Oromia. Meanwhile, major platforms like @Meta rely on automated moderation algorithms that fail to comprehend Ethiopia’s low-resource languages, such as Afaan Oromo and Tigrinya. As a result, these systems routinely fail to moderate ethnic #hatespeech and incitement to violence, while simultaneously over-censoring and removing legitimate human rights documentation as "hate speech". 🟨 While the government heavily promotes the narrative of "sovereign AI" arguing that developing localised, local-language systems protects the country from foreign dependency and "#digitalcolonialism", the report argues this is a structural illusion. In reality, Ethiopia remains heavily dependent on foreign infrastructure and technology vendors, relying on Chinese telecommunications giants like @Huawei and @ZTE to build the backbone of its digital and surveillance networks, and foreign states for its military hardware. 🟨 Exclusion of #civilsociety remains a concern as #AI governance is completely monopolised by state institutions. Crucial policy decisions and consultation workshops are held "behind closed doors". There are no permanent advisory mechanisms to involve civil society, academia, youth, or linguistic minorities in shaping how these powerful technologies are regulated. Here is the full State of Internet Freedom in Africa: Navigating the Implications of AI on Digital Democracy in #Ethiopia 2025 report 👉🏾bit.ly/StateofInternetFreedo… #FIFAfrica26 #InternetFreedomAfrica