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/)