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For nearly a decade, Prof. Vukosi Marivate has been working to ensure that Africa shapes artificial intelligence rather than being shaped by it. His appointment to the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence \u2014 the first global scientific body of its kind \u2014 has given that mission an international platform.<\/p>\n
Selected from more than 2,600 applicants across 140 countries, Marivate is one of 40 experts chosen to sit on the panel. He serves as director of the African Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Pretoria and holds the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy personal mission is to make sure that Africans have agency during these revolutions,\u201d Marivate told Forbes Africa. \u201cIf you are not actively working to build up your own capability and capacity, it is somebody else doing it on your behalf, for their own reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n
The appointment builds on years of institution-building. In 2017, Marivate co-founded the Deep Learning Indaba, widely regarded as the continent\u2019s largest AI research conference. He also co-founded Masakhane, a grassroots research initiative with thousands of volunteers building natural language processing tools for African languages, and Lelapa AI, which has launched InkubaLM, described as Africa\u2019s first multilingual large language model.<\/p>\n
The question of who benefits from AI \u2014 and who is simply used by it \u2014 runs through all of his work. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to be at the table, being on the menu,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is very important to have these technologies really represent people, because from there they can actually reach the outcomes we think AI is going to deliver. Just by saying AI exists, it is not going to solve education.\u201d<\/p>\n
South Africa has 12 official languages, yet most AI-powered voice assistants speak none of them. Marivate said the challenge of representing African languages in AI goes well beyond missing datasets. \u201cHistorical, cultural and political factors have influenced how languages were represented in digital systems,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The UN panel will deliver its first report at the Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva in July 2026, with a mandate to ground international AI policy in scientific evidence rather than speculation. Marivate said he does not expect a single global framework to emerge from the process, but believes broadening the range of voices shaping AI governance is itself a significant outcome. \u201cDecisions about artificial intelligence have often been driven from only one or a few worldviews,\u201d he said. \u201cThe reason for this panel is to bring in more voices and perspectives about what AI will mean for the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
He warned that Africa\u2019s under-investment in research and development has left it poorly positioned to influence the AI revolution, and that the lesson must be learned before the next transformative technology arrives. \u201cIf everything just accrues in one space, in one place, we are just spectators,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we\u2019re not doing that, we are not in control of whatever our future is going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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