Where are the missing values: an exploration of the need to incorporate Ubuntu values into African AI policy

Abstract As Africa is catching up to the fourth industrial revolution, AI adoption has become a pressing need, especially given the economic growth and improvement that leveraging AI could have for different public and private sectors in the continent and more crucially for climate action and achieving the sustainable development goals. Yet, although the Global South does not leverage AI as other main players, it incurs the most environmental harm from AI use by the Global North. Africa serves a pivotal role in the life cycle of AI, given the vast minerals it has, and the lack of robust AI regulations has exacerbated the ethical dump from the Global North. The lack of robust AI regulations sits in sharp contrast to the African communal values which confers duty for the community to preserve the environment. This means that an AI policy that is ‘African’ will put environmental sustainability as a main concern in the process of AI adoption. Given these weak AI regulations in Africa, it is evident that the AI policies have not incorporated Ubuntu values as a fundamental guiding principle but rather adopted Eurocentric values. In this paper, we examine how ubuntu philosophy can and should inform AI policies in Africa. For just policies to be enacted, African policies should be drawn from an African-centred framework, hinged on African communitarian values such as those pronounced in ubuntu philosophy. The paper is split into two broad projects: first, through content analysis, we examine whether African communitarian values are reflected in the current African AI policies and second, drawing from Laenui’s “dreaming phase” in the process of decolonization, we aim to ‘dream’ about the core characteristic features of an ubuntu African AI policy. In the project of dreaming, we will show how Ubuntu can be used as a framework towards the sustainability of AI in Africa. We insist that to free the global south from the bonds of colonialization, it is time to create AI policy with African values at the core in the hopes of paying tribute to the forgotten, often silenced voices, as well as a step towards digital sovereignty.