Where does pragmatic engagement end and forfeiture begin?

A test of the African digital sovereignty argument through the lens of Cassava Technologies and its relationships with NVIDIA, hyperscalers and US LLMs.

Regional data localisation only works if African-owned operators can run the trusted zone. They can.

Profiles of twelve African-owned companies delivering digital infrastructure show that sovereign regional data localisation is possible.

Sovereignty, data localisation and the off-site backup problem in Sub-Saharan Africa

How can African governments and large enterprises ensure that the backups of their data are kept sovereign?

Africa launched two competing cross-border data exchange systems within five days of each other. Nobody noticed.

AfCFTA and Smart Africa are building competing cross-border data exchange systems in a direct contradiction to the Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa.

Partner or predator?

An in-depth audit of Google's footprint in Africa and its consequences for digital sovereignty.

The view from the ground floor of African digital transformation

Data collected for all 54 African countries on the digital status of rural facilities - primary healthcare clinics, primary schools, registry offices and police stations - reveal that paper remains the overriding means of maintaining records.

"Our cloud, our chips, our algorithms" — a new kind of sovereignty emerges from Washington

At the India AI Impact Summit in February the White House Director of Tech Policy announced that its new state-funded AI Export Program will seek to impose US technology stacks on those poorer countries deemed to be of strategic interest to the USA.

Supporting health workers with AI? No one can disagree with that. Can we?

In January Bill Gates published a blog announcing a joint investment with OpenAI to deploy AI in primary healthcare clinics. This article critiques his misuse of evidence.

An exercise in open source intelligence using an AI-powered search engine.

This is an exercise in pushing the boundaries of current AI research capacity. It analyses smart city initiatives in twelve African countries. This paper is accompanied by a dataset and an annotated bibliography - all three produced by Perplexity AI. It also links to a detailed [methodology](/lab/2026/01/08/smart-cities-methodology/)