Nairobi, April 28 -- Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly shaping how economies function, influencing everything from how credit is assessed to how services are delivered.

Yet for Africa, the question is not simply how quickly these technologies are adopted, but whether they are built to understand the realities they are meant to serve.

At the heart of AI lies data. The performance of any system depends on the quality, diversity and relevance of the datasets on which it is trained. And it is precisely here that Africa faces a structural disadvantage.

Despite accounting for nearly 18 percent of the world's population, African data remains significantly under-represented in many global datasets.

African languages, identity syste...