Kenya, India and Italy have announced a strategic trilateral partnership aimed at co-designing and deploying scalable, sovereign AI systems across Africa. This makes it one of the most structured international AI collaborations involving an African government.
The agreement was unveiled following the AI Impact Summit 2026. It signals a shift from fragmented pilot projects toward what the partners describe as “AI diffusion pathways”.
The collaboration is co-led by the EkStep Foundation (India), the Directorate of Digital Economy and Emerging Technologies at Kenya’s Ministry of ICT and Digital Economy and Italy’s Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy through the G7-endorsed AI Hub for Sustainable Development, in partnership with UNDP.
Unlike traditional memoranda focused on experimentation, this initiative aims to build repeatable implementation frameworks capable of scaling impact across agriculture, health, education, livelihoods and public services.
At the center of the strategy is a goal to develop 100 AI Diffusion Pathways by 2030, enabling what the partners describe as trusted, contextual and sovereign AI systems.
The aim is to build the horizontal infrastructure that is required to sustain adoption. These include multilingual voice models that are tailored to African languages, affordable and accessible compute resources, deployment in low-connectivity environments and data ownership frameworks that are aligned with local governance.
This helps to position AI as public infrastructure and not an isolated innovation.
The main focus of this partnership is to scale voice-enabled AI solutions. In many African markets, there are huge literacy gaps, language diversity and inconsistent internet connectivity. These will make digital adoption difficult. Voice-based AI systems operating in local languages could help make AI accessible to a bigger part of the population.
With this strategy, we could see adoption in agriculture advisory services, community health programs, education support systems and public service delivery if executed effectively.
The trilateral arrangement combines India’s expertise in digital public infrastructure and population-scale technology systems, Kenya’s growing leadership in Africa’s digital and startup ecosystem and Italy’s AI Hub for Sustainable Development and industrial partnerships under the Mattei Plan.
The AI Hub is a joint initiative between UNDP and Italy’s Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy. It has been endorsed by the G7 and focuses on enabling AI systems that are aligned with sustainable development goals.
The collaboration builds on momentum that was started at the Nairobi AI Forum 2026. This opened access to computing resources for African innovators and, at the same time, highlighted the need for structured AI financing and deployment partnerships.
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