AI’s influence on human rights in Africa: catalyst for growth or false panacea?

Nikita Vajrala
Apr 13
6 min read

Updated: Apr 16

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become interwoven into the fabric of everyday life across Africa, from precision agriculture to autonomous weapon systems, shaping all aspects of life. On the 4th of April 2025, the first Global AI Summit on Africa was held in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. This culminated in the Africa Declaration on Artificial Intelligence which outlines how AI can be leveraged to engender growth and ensure its ethical adoption to protect the human rights of African citizens.¹ These rights are outlined in the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights; a framework which ensures development protects communities’ rights across the continent. AI systems intersect with almost every category of rights recognised in the Charter and possess the ability to enhance these rights with its transformational impacts. Yet, they also risk infringing upon them due to issues that can arise with representational bias or exploitative misuse. The definition of AI that will be addressed in this blog interprets AI as a range of algorithm-based technologies that solve complex tasks through functions that previously required human thinking.² My focus centres on Africa as it is a continent particularly susceptible to AI’s adverse effects. AI can serve as an amplifier of social inequality within Africa’s constituent countries³ and can also be instrumental to bridging technological global divides between itself and Western nations that could arise if it is not adopted. This blog will address the positive and negative influences of AI on: the right to dignity; the right to non-discrimination, equality and freedom from domination; and the right to life enshrined within the African Charter, and will also consider AI’s future moving forward.

The Right to Dignity

The first right I intend to address is the right to dignity, which the African Charter promises to protect, a right intrinsically linked to self-determination and autonomy in education, health and work.⁴ AI can have potentially transformational impacts on these facets of life; in education it means creating localised opportunities for citizens to learn.⁵ For example, over 110,000 users use LumaLearn,⁶ a tutor platform designed to overcome barriers of cost and language by providing accessible education for students. AI also possesses the ability to enhance agricultural productivity through disease diagnostics, climate-smart advisory services.⁷ There are even intersections between the two, with simulators such as Kwathu Farms teaching learners how to manage farms and test climate models.

Ostensibly, AI appears as a miraculous panacea that could drastically improve the quality of African citizen’s lives. However, there are also underlying dangers that lurk beneath its enticing prospect of innovation. Many of AI’s services are contingent upon internet connectivity and a reliable power source- infrastructure that not all of Africa has access to. Additionally, many of these innovations target large, commercial farms, with smallholder farmerslacking the capital to invest in AI systems.¹ Hence, AI can exacerbate inequalities between regions creating ‘technology gaps’ between small and large-scale farms.⁸ However, these issues could be remedied by technologies like Kwathu Farms that renders AI accessible for even small-scale farms and leverages existing infrastructure such as mobile phone networks.

The Right to Non-Discrimination,Equality and Freedom from Domination

Moreover, the right to non-discrimination, equality, and freedom from domination focuses on ensuring that the human rights of minorities: women, people with disabilities, and the elderly, are protected. AI could potentially enhance the rights of these marginalised identities through remote access to banking services, credit, and investment opportunities, with AI’s financial technologies facilitating economic empowerment: women’s financial independence would not be contingent on male oversight such as their husband or father’s approval.⁹

However, this is an idealistic aspiration that is covertly riddled with bias. For example, studies have found that loan repayment algorithms can exhibit gender bias with female borrowers experiencing lower approval rates.¹⁰ Additionally, not only do AI models display algorithmic biases that perpetuate existing inequalities but many technologies do not incorporate Africa’s diverse linguistic landscape, with the majority of AI training sets favouring foreign language and underrepresenting African voices.² Even when African languages are included ‘only a handful of widely spoken languages’ are represented whilst indigenous languages are eschewed.¹¹ Although efforts are being made to resolve such issues, with NLP models enabling African language inclusion.³ For example, Sahara, an African NLP,⁴ encompasses languages ‘from 50 out of 54 African countries’ rendering it one of the most extensive African NLPs.¹² Thus, AI can only support the right to non-discrimination if systematic and algorithmic biases are addressed, mitigated, and resolved. In conjunction, for AI to serve the needs of African citizens, the continent’s linguistic diversity must be embraced rather than neglected.

The Right to Life

Finally, AI has a monumental impact on this fundamental right, which requires that the state protects and respects every citizen’s life and also prohibits arbitrary deprivations of life by both state and non-state actors.¹³ Perhaps the most overt intersection between AI and the right to life exists in the adoption of autonomous weapon systems (AWS).⁵ These technologies could potentially ‘boost the capabilities of African states and militaries’ by supporting the military in medical evacuation or neutralising mines ahead of advancing troops.¹⁴

However, they also possess lethal consequences that infiltrate civilian contexts. A report from Drone Wars UK, a non-profit research group, reveals that nearly 1,000 civilians were killed in Africa in 50 separate incidents involving lethal drones between November 2021 and November 2024.¹⁵ Indisputably, the potential benefits of this technology are overshadowed by its deadly capabilities and infringement on African citizens’ human rights. Beyond immediate deaths at the hands of AWS, AI’s rapid development is far from sustainable, with many AI systems relying on workforces paid as little as $1.46 per hour.¹⁶ These human rights transgressions were so appalling that in 2024 nearly 100 Kenyan data labellers and AI workers wrote an open letter to US President Joe Biden, depicting their working conditions as akin to ‘modern-day slavery’.¹⁷ No advantages of AI could justify this unconstitutional violation of human rights, with AI transgressing the right to dignity, non-discrimination and life simultaneously.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, AI intersects with every human right enshrined within the African Charter as this once novel technology suffuses every aspect of our daily lives. AI possesses the ability to unimaginably improve human life through offering accessible education, revolutionising agricultural technologies and helping to empower marginalised identities through new services. Yet, these alluring advantages are undercut by the deeply integrated biases of AI’s data sets and its disastrous death toll through its AWS and exploitative workforce, meaning that AI can only be considered an asset to African citizens if these fatal flaws are addressed and resolved. No technology can be considered advantageous if its creation is dependent on the exploitation of living beings.

Author bio

Nikita Vajrala is an English Undergraduate student at Cambridge, particularly passionate about human rights in a global context.

Glossary of terms

¹Farmers who manage small areas of land (typically less than 10 hectares).

² This is the information fed to machine learning models to teach them how to create predictions and generate content.

³ NLP stands for Natural Language Processing, it is a branch of AI that uses machine learning to help understand and generate a wide range of human languages.

⁴ An NLP focussed specifically on African languages.

⁵ Autonomous weapons systems are machines that can independently search for, identify and attack targets without direct human oversight using AI and sensors.

Reference list

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