A new GSMA study of 200 AI-active South African firms finds the problem was never the law. It's that good law, on its own, governs nothing. There is a comfortable story about why AI governance is weak in African markets, and it goes like this: the regulation
The IMF gave 174 economies a score for how ready they are to use AI. Africa sits at the bottom. The more interesting question though, is whether the test is measuring the right things. In June 2024, the International Monetary Fund did something useful and slightly dangerous: it put a
Promise and peril in roughly equal measure and why the people building here are solving the real problem, not a lesser version of it. I want to set out plainly what I believe about this work, because I think the prevailing way of talking about AI and finance in emerging
Two of the most dynamic emerging markets looked at the same problem AI giving financial advice and reached for almost opposite tools. The contrast tells you something about what regulating AI actually means. Every regulator in the world is staring at the same question right now: what do you do
Most AI-in-finance tools are built on an assumption that quietly breaks the moment you cross into an emerging market: that the data is there. There is a particular kind of confidence you can only have if you have never built for an emerging market. It shows up in
The line between "education" and "advice" used to be academic. As of December 2026, it decides who needs a license. Build an AI tool that helps Kenyans with their money and you run into a question lawyers love and engineers hate: at what point does helpful
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