Glossary

African AI Sovereignty, Defined

A working glossary of the institutions, instruments, and technical concepts that shape Africa's AI agenda.

Sovereign AI: Artificial intelligence systems whose models, training data, compute infrastructure, and governance are owned and controlled within a specific jurisdiction or continent, rather than rented from foreign providers.
African Language Model: A large language model whose training corpus, tokenizer, and evaluation benchmarks include substantial coverage of African languages and African cultural contexts.
Kigali Declaration on AI: The continental agreement signed in April 2025 by 54 African nations establishing a unified African position on artificial intelligence and announcing the $60 billion Africa AI Fund.
Africa AI Fund: The $60 billion continental investment vehicle announced at the Kigali AI summit in April 2025 to finance African AI infrastructure, talent, and applications.
AU Continental AI Strategy: The African Union's official policy framework for AI development across the continent, covering ethics, infrastructure, skills, applications, and continental cooperation.
AfDB AI 10 Billion Initiative: The African Development Bank and UNDP joint initiative targeting $10 billion in AI investment across Africa by 2035.
Smart Africa: The continental policy alliance of 40 African heads of state and 1.4 billion citizens coordinating digital transformation, including AI policy, across member states.
Low-Resource Language: A language for which limited digital text, audio, and labeled data exist, making conventional model training difficult. Most African languages are low-resource in current frontier AI systems.
Accessibility Layer: Kora Lab's product workstream that adapts frontier AI tools for African end users through cultural localization, multilingual interfaces, and affordable delivery.
Sovereign Model Lab: Kora Lab's research workstream that trains, evaluates, and releases African-owned language and multimodal models, datasets, and benchmarks.
Open African Languages Corpus: Kora Lab's open dataset of curated text across African languages, released under permissive licenses for use by researchers and institutions.