# **15% AI Literacy by 2026: How Africa Plans to Rewrite the Rules of the AI Race** 

Executive Summary

History rarely forgives those who mistake dominance for leadership. President Trump’s recent executive order to prioritize AI education for American youth—echoing China’s nationwide AI curriculum mandate—may seem, on the surface, a win for progress. And indeed it is for their countries, but, as this article will argue, not for the globe. Search deeper, and you will find that the motives behind this reveal a darker calculus: a race to monopolize AI’s future under the guise of ‘global dominance.’ The real issue lies in the language chosen—framing AI advancement as a quest for dominance rather than a shared journey of collective progress—undermining our potential to move forward together as a human race. For Africa, this rhetoric resurrects colonial ghosts, where ‘progress’ meant extracting rubber and cocoa, never sharing the tools to build. This colonial approach is seen today as Silicon Valley and Beijing vie to mine Africa’s languages for chatbots and its youth for cheap data labor, the continent risks becoming a data hinterland, perpetually feeding algorithms it cannot own. This is why Africa’s AI Declaration—endorsed by all 54 states—and its target of attaining 15% AI literacy by the end of 2026 are revolutionary. Henceforth, and as beautifully captured in the Declaration, Africa rejects the role of a passive consumer and asserts its right to design AI that solves its own problems and reflects its own values. Educating youth isn’t the problem—it’s educating them under a worldview that reduces our continent to a resource. America and China may chase dominance, but Africa is sharpening its claws to lead. 

Global Interests
President Trump’s recent executive order to prioritize AI education for American youth is not an isolated act but a calculated move in a broader strategy to cement U.S. hegemony over the AI-driven future. This announcement comes hot on the heels of China’s mandated AI education in its national curriculum, requiring schoolchildren to learn AI fundamentals as early as primary school. The ambitions of both nations are commendable, but we fear their rivalry risks actualizing the Kiswahili proverb, ‘Fahari wawili wakipigana, nyasi huumia’ (When two bulls clash, the grass is trampled). While upskilling American youth in AI is a worthy pursuit, the Executive Order’s stark vow to ‘maintain global dominance’ is not just provocative—it echoes the zero-sum logic of Cold War rivalry.

AI’s transformative potential isn’t confined by borders; its ethical and economic impacts will ripple across continents. America’s vision, as espoused in the executive order’s White House Fact Sheet, is to “maintain America’s global dominance in this technological revolution for future generations.” If the U.S. alone shapes this technology, we risk replicating historical inequities where innovation benefits the few, not the many.

This initiative—establishing a White House Task Force, funding teacher training, and incentivizing apprenticeships—aligns with aggressive policy frameworks like OpenAI’s US Economic Blueprint. This Blueprint urges the U.S. to lock in American competitiveness through export controls, deregulation favoring private-sector innovation, and infrastructure investments to outpace China. OpenAI’s proposals, submitted to the White House Office of Science and Technology, explicitly frame AI as a tool to advance “democratic” values while neutralizing Chinese influence. The proposal advocates for policies that “protect America’s AI lead” by restricting technology diffusion and securing dominance over critical infrastructure like semiconductors and energy grids.

This U.S.-centric agenda is further amplified by the compliance of American tech giants. Since President Trump’s return to office in January 2025, American tech giants like Meta and Google have implemented significant policy shifts that align more closely with the administration’s agenda. These changes have included rolling back content moderation policies and scaling back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Meta, for instance, has ended its partnerships with independent fact-checkers on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, replacing them with a user-driven “community notes” system. This move was justified by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as an effort to reduce perceived political bias and promote free expression. In terms of DEI efforts, Meta has dismantled its diversity-focused hiring and training programs, citing a “shifting legal and policy landscape”. Similarly, Google has scrapped its diversity-based hiring targets and is reassessing its DEI initiatives in response to recent changes in U.S. legislation and executive orders under President Trump’s administration. Moreover, in recent months, the AI industry has undergone a quiet yet strategically calculated shift in language. Prominent leaders such as NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang have moved away from calling the core infrastructure “AI data centers,” instead adopting the term “AI factories.” While this may initially sound like mere semantics, the change in terminology carries significant political weight. It reflects a deliberate attempt to align Silicon Valley’s goals with broader national industrial agendas, especially the Trump-era push to bring manufacturing back to the United States.

Meanwhile, the U.S.-China trade war has intensified. The U.S. government has banned the export of advanced GPUs like Nvidia’s H100 and A100 to China, with the explicit goal of limiting China’s progress in artificial intelligence and supercomputing. These restrictions began with sweeping export controls in October 2022, which targeted high-performance chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment. The controls were further tightened in October 2023 and again in December 2024, expanding to cover even chips specifically designed to comply with earlier rules, like Nvidia’s H20, which now also requires a special export license for China. Yet, despite these efforts to cripple its access to cutting-edge hardware, China stunned the global tech community in April 2025 with the release of “DeepSeek,” a powerful, domestically-trained AI model on par with GPT-4, proving Beijing and her people are no pushovers – and further intensifying the AI arms race between the two powers.

African Interests

For Africa, these dynamics are a wake-up call. In a modern echo of the Cold War, the U.S. and China are fiercely vying for control over AI’s future.  China accelerates state-backed AI innovation and expands its digital footprint across emerging markets. At the same time, OpenAI’s US Economic Blueprint urges export controls to ensure American AI systems dominate global markets. The continent, thus, risks becoming a battleground for hegemonic interests, its data mined and its markets partitioned. 

For AI to truly serve humanity, it must be democratized. As Africans, home to the world’s youngest population, we need to heed to clarion call to reject being a passive recipient of this revolution but rather a critical co-author. As America invests in its youth, Africa’s leapfrogging potential hinges on Afrocentric AI ecosystems that address local challenges while contributing globally.

It is also important to note that Africa is not the only geopolitical bloc redefining the rules in the global AI race. On May 12, 2025, Sheikh Mohammed, Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Dubai, announced that Artificial Intelligence would become a mandatory subject in all UAE schools. The new AI curriculum will include up to 20 hours of instruction per academic year, covering topics such as ethical AI use, prompt engineering for AI tools, and the critical evaluation of AI-generated content. This initiative is part of the UAE’s broader strategy to diversify its oil-dependent economy and position itself as a regional leader in AI and technological innovation. Just recently, Gulf nations such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia entered into major AI infrastructure agreements with the United States, treating them with the same strategic importance as traditional deals in oil, gas, and defense. The message is unmistakable: AI has become the new petroleum, and controlling its production infrastructure is now a key pillar of national power.

What then must we do? Beyond Extraction: The Africa AI Declaration 

At the Global AI Summit on Africa in Kigali (3rd to 4th April 2025), a watershed moment unfolded as all 54 African governments signed the Africa Declaration on Artificial Intelligence, a bold repudiation of the continent’s historical relegation to the periphery of global value chains. For centuries, Africa was cast as a supplier of raw materials—its minerals, labor, and creativity extracted to fuel foreign industrialization while being denied the tools to manufacture or innovate. The Declaration flips this script, envisioning a future where Africa shapes AI technologies rather than passively consuming them. It rejects the colonial-era paradigm of “central states” dictating terms to the “periphery,” instead asserting Africa’s right to lead in designing AI systems that reflect its languages, cultures, and developmental priorities.

As Africa shifts from being a passive consumer of AI technologies to becoming an active developer, the vision set out in the Declaration calls for a bold commitment: training 15% of the continent’s population in AI literacy by 2026.

In 1962, sociologist Everett Rogers introduced the Diffusion of Innovation theory, which explains how new ideas and technologies spread through societies. A core tenet is the tipping point: once 15-20% of a population adopts an innovation, it reaches critical mass and accelerates toward mainstream acceptance. This threshold represents the early adopters and early majority—groups whose influence reshapes social norms and reduces uncertainty for the broader population.

The AI Talent Readiness Index—a framework measuring the continent’s capacity to cultivate AI skills through education, infrastructure, and policy alignment—makes one thing clear:  Africa’s diversity demands a decentralized approach to AI talent development. The 15% AI literacy target must be distributed strategically to amplify regional advantages: North Africa can harness the strength of its universities, particularly in Egypt and Tunisia, to train world-class researchers; West Africa can leverage Nigeria’s vibrant startup ecosystem to build entrepreneurial AI literacy; East Africa can capitalize on it’s mobile money innovations to democratize access to AI tools and skills; Southern Africa can draw on South Africa’s strong digital infrastructure and research capacity to accelerate technical specialization; and Central Africa, with its dynamic and youthful population, represents a vital frontier where grassroots innovation can be nurtured to drive inclusive AI growth. 

With 60% of Africans under 25, achieving 15% AI literacy means equipping 200 million youth with foundational AI skills. How exactly is Africa going to attain 15% AI Literacy by 2026? The Africa Declaration on Artificial Intelligence envisages a continent-wide strategy anchored in decentralized collaboration, cultural relevance, and systemic equity. Pan-African regional bodies like Smart Africa will partner with member states to co-develop National AI Strategies, ensuring alignment with the Declaration’s goals, including mandating AI curriculum integration at all education levels, from primary schools to vocational institutes and universities. Regional AI innovation hubs—like East Africa’s mobile money-integrated programs and North Africa’s Arabic-language NLP initiatives—will co-design localized curricula with governments, startups, and universities, while public-private partnerships will subsidize data costs and redirect foreign tech R&D budgets toward training African engineers. Rejecting homogeneity, the plan tailors AI literacy to grassroots realities: Kenyan pastoralists engage via livestock health apps, Lagos entrepreneurs learn through fintech bootcamps, and rural communities access training via radio modules, “tech tents,” and AI Village Champions. Crucially, linguistic sovereignty ensures materials are available in African languages, dismantling Anglophone elitism. By prioritizing hyper-local ownership over imported solutions, these strategies aim to transform 200 million youth from passive users into architects of Africa’s AI future, proving innovation thrives when rooted in context, not dominance.

Conclusion
While the U.S. pours investments into AI to “maintain global leadership,” Africa’s 15% target is about something deeper: democratizing innovation. Diffusion theory reminds us that exclusionary systems eventually collapse. The White House frames AI education around sustaining U.S. “dominance,” but Africa’s ambition is different: “ownership”. At 15% AI literacy by 2026, we move beyond importing foreign technologies to contextualizing and creating solutions rooted in African realities.

Inclusive ecosystems — where 200 million African youth can code, critique, and innovate — don’t just adapt global trends; they redefine them.