New AI governance platform seeks to map Africa’s digital future across 54 nations
A new Ghana-registered foundation has launched what it describes as Africa’s first comprehensive intelligence platform dedicated to tracking artificial intelligence governance and infrastructure across all 54 African Union member states.
The African AI Governance Index Foundation announced the initiative in Accra in February 2026, unveiling a suite of open-access tools designed to centralise fragmented data on national AI strategies, regulatory frameworks and compute infrastructure across the continent.
The launch positions the Foundation as a new institutional player in Africa’s rapidly evolving digital policy landscape, seeking to provide clarity for governments, investors and development partners navigating the continent’s AI ambitions.
“The data existed. It was scattered across 54 different places, buried in government websites, locked in consultant reports, or simply uncollected,” said Kwame A. A. Opoku, Founder and Executive Director of AAGI. “We built the infrastructure to centralize it, verify it, and make it useful. Africa cannot lead on AI governance if no one can see where Africa stands.”
At the centre of the initiative is the African AI Policy Tracker, now live and monitoring national AI strategies, regulatory developments and institutional frameworks across every AU member state. The Foundation describes the platform as the first open-access resource offering a consolidated view of which countries have published AI strategies, which are drafting them and which have yet to begin formal processes.
While global benchmarks such as Oxford Insights’ Government AI Readiness Index assess nearly 200 countries, the Foundation argues that Africa-specific depth has been lacking. Its model is built around an 80-indicator framework, which it says offers more detailed resolution for regional policy analysis.
Beyond policy mapping, the Foundation is preparing to roll out an Infrastructure Tracker in the coming weeks, aimed at providing visibility into Africa’s growing data centre ecosystem. According to figures released by the organisation, the platform will track 223 data centre facilities across 38 countries, covering a market valued at $3.49 billion in 2024 and approximately 780 megawatts of IT capacity.
The infrastructure tool will extend beyond counting facilities to map submarine cable landing points, hyperscale cloud presence, energy sources powering compute infrastructure, regulatory conditions and AI-specific computing capacity.
“Africa holds less than 2% of the world's data centers while preparing to absorb the largest demographic expansion in human history,” Opoku noted. “Investors are making billion-dollar infrastructure decisions without adequate intelligence. We're fixing that.”
The Foundation’s assessment model spans eight pillars, including strategy and vision, governance and regulation, infrastructure and data, human capital and research, innovation ecosystems, ethics and inclusion, regional integration, and implementation impact. It says the full methodology, including its Indicator Codebook, Data Collection Protocols and Scoring Criteria, will be made public to allow governments and researchers to scrutinise and build upon the framework.
As part of its initial rollout, the organisation has begun a 10-country pilot assessment designed to test its methodology through direct government engagement and local validation before scaling continent-wide. The pilot seeks to reflect Africa’s regional and economic diversity.
Botswana has been confirmed as the first formal country partner through a collaboration with Ai4Botswana, while Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa are listed among the Founding Pilot Nations as memoranda of understanding are finalised.
“We're not building a remote observation post,” Stella Agara, Founding Partner explained. “We're building a network. Every Country Partner strengthens the data, validates the methodology, and extends AAGI's reach. By the time we've covered 54 nations, we'll have 54 partners invested in the accuracy of what we publish.”
The Foundation argues that its work comes at a pivotal moment. Africa’s data centre market is projected to reach $6.81 billion by 2030, expanding at an annual rate of 12.86 per cent. At the same time, hyperscale technology firms are expanding their footprint across the continent, the African Union has endorsed continental AI frameworks, and development finance institutions are increasing allocations to digital infrastructure.
According to the Foundation, major policy and investment decisions are being taken without sufficient consolidated intelligence on regulatory clarity, energy readiness, talent pipelines and governance safeguards.
AAGI has opened calls for partnerships spanning country-level data collaborators, research institutions, funding bodies, strategic amplifiers and advisory board members. It describes itself as a non-profit research institution committed to open-access intelligence, with registrations in Ghana and subsidiary entities in Kenya and Delaware in the United States.
By combining continental data aggregation with on-the-ground validation through local partners, the Foundation says it aims to create what it calls a “single source of truth” for Africa’s AI governance readiness, positioning itself as an information backbone for the continent’s next phase of digital transformation.
