Calls for Africa to secure its tech sovereignty amid digital transformation push

As the digital transformation debate in Africa shapes up, technology or digital sovereignty is increasingly being mentioned as a policy priority for governments. Many opinions hold that at a time when countries are pursuing their digital transformation programs, governments must be serious about building and owing their digital public infrastructure as well as other technology systems.

Recently, during the 2025 CEO Summit in Accra, Ghana, Moses Kwesi Baiden Jr, the CEO of Margins Group, an indigenous Ghanaian digital ID and biometrics company, expressed his views on this, saying it is a matter of urgency. Margins Group produces Ghana’s national ID card.

Baiden noted that at a time when the world is getting more and more fractured with trade wars and protectionism tendencies, Africa must seize the opportunity to begin to develop and use its own innovative technologies, according Daily Guide Network.

Speaking under the theme “Leading Ghana’s Economic Reset: Transforming Business and Governance for a Sustainable Futuristic Economy,” the CEO emphasised the place of the private sector in Africa’s digital transformation and digital economy push, insisting that their collaboration can support investments in data centers and cloud services for localized data storage.

According to the official, “Africa must not remain on the periphery of global transformation,” and that there is need to “build an Africa where data is sovereign, systems are secure, and innovation is homegrown.”

One of the areas where Africa is still lagging is data sovereignty where statistics show that only about two percent of all data produced by Africa is stored in Africa – a fact which the Africa regional chief of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Emmauel Manasseh, deplored during a connectivity panel at GITEX Africa 2025.

To Baiden, African must not allow itself to be dominated by foreign technologies, which often do not take into consideration the continent’s unique challenges. Such dominance, he said, also comes with vulnerability challenges and concerns about unorthodox data exploitation for economic ascendancy.

As an example, these concerns have been a bit pointed with regard to AI where there has been a series of calls from different quarters for the putting in place of frameworks and safeguards that enable the deployment of AI systems that reflect the African reality and context.

“Imagine a future where your corporate memory, your data, your identity can disappear overnight, not due to your failure, but because of decisions made halfway across the world. The future belongs to those who create it,” Baiden said.

While Africa looks to design and create its own digital technology systems, Baiden advises that transparency, inclusion and bold leadership must be top on the agenda. He also suggests that the continent should also review its governance and public-private partnership architecture, so that it can effectively participate in the building of a digital future that takes its interests into consideration.

The African Unions ’s AI Strategy 2025-2030 has also been referenced as an important roadmap for Africa’s digital sovereignty, as it sets out the pathway for the continent to be an active creator and not only a consumer of AI-driven solutions.

A country like the Democratic Republic of Congo is working to implement a digital identity and digital government system to facilitate access to public services by citizens. The country surely has tech sovereignty at the back of its mind with Posts and Telecommunications Minister, Augustin Kibassa Maliba telling GovInsider in a recent interview that they have been investing to build connectivity infrastructure such as Tier 3 data centres to securely store citizen data.  Other countries like Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are also said to be been making data localization efforts.

While Africa talks tech sovereignty, Europe is already acting with a EuroStack tech sovereignty plan estimated at 300 billion euro (US$340 billion).

Article Topics

African Union AI Strategy  |  AI  |  data center  |  digital economy  |  digital government  |  investment  |  Margins ID Group  |  research and development