The Kigali Declaration, One Year On

A unified continental position

The Africa Declaration on AI — signed in Kigali, Rwanda, in April 2025 by all 54 African Union member states — was a milestone without precedent. For the first time, the continent spoke with a single voice on artificial intelligence.

The declaration did not merely express aspiration. It committed signatories to specific principles: sovereign AI infrastructure, ethical deployment, continental cooperation, and a shared funding mechanism. It also announced the Africa AI Fund, a $60 billion continental investment vehicle designed to finance everything from compute infrastructure to talent pipelines.

A year later, the question is no longer about the declaration's content. It is about execution.

What has been achieved

The year since Kigali has seen genuine progress on several fronts.

The African Union Commission activated a dedicated AI task force within three months of the declaration, charged with coordinating implementation across member states. The task force has published a preliminary continental AI infrastructure map identifying existing compute capacity, research centres, and data assets across 34 countries.

The AfDB and UNDP jointly launched the AI 10 Billion Initiative in February 2026, targeting $10 billion in blended finance for AI infrastructure by 2035. The initiative has already secured commitments from three African sovereign wealth funds and two multilateral development banks.

At the national level, at least 15 African countries now have active AI roadmaps, up from five at the time of the Kigali summit. Togo activated Digital Strategy 2025-2030, which includes AI-specific provisions for language technology and digital public infrastructure. Rwanda, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa have all announced national AI compute procurement plans.

Smart Africa, the continental policy alliance of 40 heads of state, has integrated AI sovereignty into its digital transformation framework and is coordinating cross-border data governance standards.

What remains to be done

Progress on policy has not been matched by progress on technical execution. The gap between declaration and delivery remains wide.

The Africa AI Fund, while politically transformative, has not yet disbursed a single dollar for model training or dataset development. The governance structure is still being negotiated among member states, and the technical criteria for funding allocation have not been published.

Continental compute capacity remains critically underdeveloped. Africa currently accounts for less than one percent of global data centre capacity. The AU task force's infrastructure map reveals that no country in sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa has access to the GPU clusters required to train a large language model from scratch.

Talent pipelines are equally constrained. A 2025 study estimated that Africa produces fewer than 2,500 AI researchers with advanced degrees per year, compared to more than 30,000 in North America. The researchers who do graduate often leave for positions abroad because there are no continental labs to work in.

The funding paradox

The $60 billion Africa AI Fund and the $10 billion AfDB-UNDP initiative represent unprecedented financial commitment. But there is a structural problem that neither addresses directly.

Both funds are designed to finance infrastructure and policy. They assume the existence of a technical lab capable of executing the research and development work that the infrastructure is meant to support. They allocate capital for GPUs but not for the models that run on them. They fund data centres but not the datasets that fill them.

This is not a criticism of the funds. A fund cannot train a model. A declaration cannot build a dataset. These are technical tasks that require a technical institution.

Where Kora Lab fits

Kora Lab exists to close the gap between the political will expressed in Kigali and the technical execution required to realise it.

We are not a policy institution. We do not compete with the AU, the AfDB, Smart Africa, or national governments. Those bodies provide the framework and the capital. Kora Lab provides the technical layer: the models, the datasets, the benchmarks, and the trained researchers operating at continental scale.

The Kigali Declaration created the demand for African sovereign AI. Kora Lab exists to supply it.