Reimagining Official Development Assistance: Sovereign AI, Industrial Innovation, and Structural Cooperation Reforms in the Global South

Official Development Assistance is at a structural inflection point. The 2025 contraction in donor aid, the largest on record, coincides with rising external debt service in aid-receiving economies and with the persistent failure of the humanitarian system to route funding to local and national actors. This article argues that the transfer paradigm has exhausted its macroeconomic utility: intermediary chains extract rents and dilute accountability, while externally hosted digital infrastructure threatens a new, algorithmic form of dependency. It formalises Sovereign AI as an optimisation of interdependence across four complementary pillars (data, compute, models, and governance and talent) and proposes a reformed blueprint built on three priorities: co-investment vehicles for sovereign technological and industrial capability, including indigenous advanced materials; radical localisation of decision rights through direct country-system financing; and co-designed mutual accountability with open data and distributed-ledger traceability. Includes six tables and five figures drawing on OECD DAC, World Bank WDI and Development Initiatives data.