Computer Says Maybe

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Alix: Hey there, this is Alix Dunn. Welcome back to Computer Says Maybe, where I talk to the people pushing back on tech power and fighting for something better. This week's conversation is part of a series we are producing in partnership with Luminate, exploring how communities around the world are confronting the consequences of the tech industry's promise of, quote, "progress" and building alternatives rooted in justice and real public benefit.

Each episode looks at these questions in a different context, and today we are turning our attention to Africa, where social media and AI are often celebrated as sources of new economic opportunity. We're told they can help creators, entrepreneurs, and communities who've been excluded from traditional markets build new livelihoods.

But these opportunities don't exist in a vacuum. They are built into systems that rely on exploitative labor, environmental destruction in some cases, and business models that deepen inequity. Much of the value generated by African creativity and labor is still captured [00:01:00] elsewhere, while the people making these technologies work have little say in how they're developed or who benefits.

Across the continent, though, people are finding ways to challenge that imbalance, adapting technologies to their own needs, and pushing for a bigger role in shaping the digital economy. And today, I'm joined by 'Gbenga Sesan, Chenai Chair, and Ojoma Ochai to unpack how they navigate that gap between promised benefits and systemic costs, and how they're working to ensure that people creating value from these technologies have a greater say in how that value is shared.

So let's get into it.

'Gbenga Sesan: My name is 'Gbenga Sesan. I'm the exec director of Paradigm Initiative. We are a Pan-African nonprofit that works on digital rights and digital inclusion across 28 countries on the continent. I almost always trace my beginning story to when I was personally denied access when I was in high school.

There were some of my colleagues who were allowed to go into the computer room, as it was called at the time, to play games, imagine, and I wasn't allowed because I didn't know how to use computers. So [00:02:00] whatever it was, I just wanted to learn how to use it, and I made a promise. I was gonna teach other young people so they don't get embarrassed the way I was denied access and sent back from the entrance to the computer room and started, you know, trying to pay back when I learned how to use computers.

And then I got into computers and realized there was a lot more. Uh, there were policies that guided the whole thing, and so I got curious. Actually, I trained some young people who admitted that they had committed, you know, cyber fraud before. And I mentioned to a government agency in charge of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, and they asked me, "Oh, where did you do the training?"

And I was like, "Yeah, you know, in I-Ibotemieta in Lagos, Nigeria." And he was like, "Oh, let's, let's come there and arrest them." And I was like, "Nope. They no longer do that. Now they design websites and things like that." And he said, "Well, that's the law. If you don't like it, change it." He said it as a joke, but it was a challenge for me.

You know, he said change the law, so I said, "Okay, fine. Let's, let's change it." So that's sort of [00:03:00] my beginning, a personal challenge, uh, you know, towards learning and also to changing the laws, which explains why those are the two things I do today.

Alix: Amazing. Um, Ojoma, you want to jump in? Like, how did you, how did you get into this work?

Ojoma Ochai: Hi, everyone. My name is Ojoma Ochai. I'm the managing director of ccHub Africa and co-founder of the Creative Economy Practice at ccHub. Across the ccHub group, we enable the innovation and creative ecosystems of Africa. We're physically located with our hubs in five countries, Nigeria, Namibia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Togo, but we support entrepreneurs and innovators across 49 countries in Africa.

My background is in computer engineering and technology. Unfortunately, I don't have a poetic, as poetic a story as, as 'Gbenga. I just got good grades, and so I was told, "You should be a science student and do physics and maths." And I did it . And so I started out working in the technology sector, but, um, my father is a professor of [00:04:00] theater arts, so I was always around storytellers.

And so after a few years, I was wanting to do something else because this was early years of internet. I worked in internet infrastructure, and it was all quite boring and dense, and I thought, "This storytelling thing is super cool. Let me pivot." Um, long story short, I switched to arts management, and I specialized in creative economy policy over something like 15 years.

I was fascinated by this idea of who gets to create, who gets to participate, whose story gets told, and how do perceptions get shaped by music and film and television and so on. And after about 15 years or so of working in the creative industries, I kind of came full cycle because then I got interested in how technology was shaping these things about what we were consuming in terms of content and so on.

And so in 2021, I co-founded the Creative Economy Practice at CC Hub, and so I now work across the spectrum from [00:05:00] creativity to innovation and technology, enabling people who are working in that space, enabling innovators, technologists, storytellers, but always with that underlying question of who gets to participate, who gets to shape the rules, and who gets to determine what gets made, and just the operating principles of these ecosystems.

Alix: Chenai, tell us, how did you end up running a linguistically focused, uh, organization?

Chenai Chair: Hi, everyone. I am Chenai Chair. I'm the director of Masakhane African Languages Hub based in Johannesburg, but we work across the continent focusing on ensuring African language inclusion in AI. I definitely found myself by chance in a university program that focused on the global value chain that specifically focused on how people were making use of mobile phones.

And it was quite interesting because, I mean, like it's a mobile phone I'm holding, and we're actually doing sociological study on how, like, women who are farmers, who often [00:06:00] don't have access to information, are actually creating information systems around accessing their mobile phones. But also, you know, being a curious person, I grew up in a house with a computer that was specifically for my older siblings.

So I was the child who was like, when they finished their lessons or their tinkerings, I would be in there playing games because it was entertainment, but growing up around the technology. Um, but also kind of like having experienced technology as a means to connect with family and friends. So having a...

I'm Zimbabwean, and a lot of the people that we are connected to as family are in the diaspora, or there's a movement to the diaspora. So there was this sort of like technology as part of communication, digital technology, and then thinking about it from a perspective of, "So what's the public interest aspect?"

Because at the end of the day- I had the privilege of be- of having access to technology because I had family members in the diaspora who could afford to buy the [00:07:00] computer at home and have it at home. But then when you think about it from a privileged perspective, I also face the nuances of, like, being a girl who shouldn't be studying computers, and you should be studying something else.

And so also growing up in that context where you realize that at the end of the day, we all contribute to knowledge from our different standpoints. And so then I was challenged to think about, like, how do I work as a sociologist in digital technology? And fortunately, had the opportunity to work in the computer department thinking about water and sanitation and health, and then working for a research institution that was thinking about, um, public interest policy and creating the data.

And then subsequently, every technology moment that has come, my central question has remained, and so how are people experiencing it? Mm. And particularly thinking about it from a perspective of your identity, your, your access to opportunities, your geographical background, and all the other factors. So [00:08:00] that's how I've worked around-- That's how I got into it.

I was challenged, and I was curious.

Alix: You said something interesting, Chenai, where you said, um, you like to study how people experience technology as it's, as it's new. And I'm wondering, like, when you think back about the last, you know, 15 years and how technology has created basically a different world, to what extent does it feel like, in the various contexts where you all work, that it's something that has been, like, experienced versus something that's been, like, these pathways of really exciting opportunity?

Ojoma Ochai: It's not a binary If you see what I mean. It's almost like a gradient of the fact that in some aspects of our lives we experience technology and it's something done to us, and in other aspects of our lives, we can actively make choices and we have agency and power to really take advantage of the opportunities that technology provides.

Because we've seen people in our work who [00:09:00] build all kinds of things relating to governance and holding governments accountable, to people building things around creating a whole new genre of music and, you know, people building solutions that help them navigate their daily realities, whether it's payments or accessing public services.

These are things that people are actively building. So I would say that in my world, it's about people building things that are appropriate to their context with the constraints that they have, obviously, but being able to look beyond that and see what's possible from the whatever starting point they find themselves.

Alix: Are there example, like what's your favorite thing that someone has been pursuing in your network to like build that you think is interesting?

Ojoma Ochai: One of the biggest challenges that we see and that we talk about in an African, uh, Nigerian context is that startups and SMEs have big issues around access to finance, and it's such a big [00:10:00] obstacle, and when you really look at the gap in that access to finance, you find that there, a, a m- a multiplicity of reasons why that is, including the fact that a lot of startups and SMEs don't have proper records, financial records And so what a company that I've just, uh, supported is a company that takes, uh, startups' data in whatever form it is.

They've built an AI tool to translate their data into financial statements, and helps them calculate their unit economics, and helps them just build a financial narrative based on whatever data in whatever form it is. And I feel like that's a situation of high agency where it's easy to sit back and think, "Oh, there isn't enough cash."

But recognizing that that's not the issue, the issue is often not that there isn't money, it's that there's a delta between the resources that are available and the capacity of these startups to [00:11:00] access those resources. And so that's a really early stage company that I'm so excited by because they've taken this technology, they've focused on a real problem, and rather than say, "We'll spend two, three years giving advice," they said, "But how do we use this technology to convert the data that exists and build this financial narrative?"

So that's one example. If I throw it back all the way to the beginning of CC Hub, one of the companies that came out of a very early CC Hub hackathon is a company called Budget. And what Budget does is take dense government data, budgets, reports, and make it into more user-friendly formats And that stimulates active citizenship because suddenly an obstacle which was dense, 100, 300-page budget reports become things that citizens can ingest and ask questions.

Why, why are you spending this much? Why you, why have you not [00:12:00] completed this project three years later? And just makes it into something that citizens can use and becau- has become such a powerful tool in that relationship between citizens and the state and demanding accountability. So two very different examples, although as I say it, I realize they both relate to data and records and simplifying things.

And so in that sense, it's about people just spotting a problem and saying, "How can we use the tools we have, storytelling, AI, or whatever, to bring down an obstacle and achieve s- change at scale?" 15 years, 16 years later, Budget is one of the most important organizations on the continent as it relates to government accountability, transparency of government, uh, records and budgets, and that kind of stuff.

And they've expanded across the continent and now a global company, which is really exciting to watch.

Alix: Well, it's super interesting thinking about the challenges small businesses experience, and one of them I'm sure is paperwork, and also the [00:13:00] financial literacy required to kind of communicate about your business in a way that you can go borrow money, that you can engage in basically, like, maturing your business, that that is extremely challenging, I mean, for any size of business, and it's a core part of, you know, success or f- failure in some cases.

It does make me wonder, like, when I think about AI technologies and if we think about large, to the extent large language models is the, the tool that you're describing, there's probably in a nearby city data labelers, um, that are working to sort of label and train models, um, and in some cases are being paid very little or being exposed to harmful content.

Um, and basically it's well documented some of the, the, the labor practices there. Um, I presume that you kind of have these two parts of your brain that are thinking about both of those things and, like, how do you navigate those two sort of sitting, sitting side by side?

Ojoma Ochai: Susie Hub, we always [00:14:00] take an ecosystem approach.

Alix: Mm.

Ojoma Ochai: And it's based on this idea that no one part of the ecosystem can function without action and agency from another part of the ecosystem. And if I, uh, if I think about that, um- exploitative context, this is where the role of policy comes in. Because at the very minimum, uh, states need to take that agency and determine under what conditions their citizens should be working, whether it's in technology or any other part of the economy.

And I think that's a, a place where there's still a lot of work to be done, where even though technologies are moving really fast, we don't know where AI's gonna go. I think this is a universal principle that all states need to sit down and think about, because it doesn't matter if it's blockchain or AI or data labeling or, or manufacturing or working in lithium mines or whatever, there need to be basic labor [00:15:00] principles that determine what's acceptable in any jurisdiction.

Mm-hmm. And so that's an area where we need to do a lot more work, I think.

Alix: Yeah. I think you're totally right. 'Gbenga, did you wanna jump in on this question of sort of the extent to which you feel like technology has happened to the people in your network, um, versus- ... has been something that they've been able to kind of seize and do things with?

'Gbenga Sesan: A lot of the young people that we worked with, for them, it was a survival thing, right? It was the fact that they were already in high school, and this is, this is how, you know, Pain started our training. We had young people who were in high school. Uh, we started in a location called Ajegunle, uh, in Lagos, Nigeria.

It's, I mean, it, it used to be the big slum that everyone talked about, like Kibera in, in, in Kenya. And literally, when you're out of secondary school, and the story I heard when I went to do some training that was invited by church group, and I was speaking to the kids about computers, and they were like, "Oh."

You know, the speaker questions I got before then were questions like, "Oh, this laptop, does it have enough power to do the same thing like [00:16:00] a desktop computer?" But their own questions were different. It was survival questions. It was like, "Well, I've been through high school. My parents have said I should go and get a job, and they now want to stop my education because my younger brother has to go to school, and they have to pay for it.

What can this device you're talking about and boasting about, what can it do for me?" Mm-hmm. So it was a survival thing. It was that without computing, they didn't have a better chance in an already oversaturated job market, so they had to learn this. It was already happening to them, and then they had to learn and to embrace it.

Uh, and it was, it was, it was such a dynamic that some of them made success of it. In fact, one of, one of, one of the most inspiring stories for me at the time, in the early days, in 2007, was a guy who learned about Excel, you know, just Microsoft Excel, was so focused. And I don't know why he was fascinated.

I think it was about, you know, the spreadsheets and the numbers and how he was calculating everything for him without him having to, you know, use his brain to do the mental maths and [00:17:00] things like that. And he focused so much of this in cl- on this in class that When one of our partners, the UK Trade and Investment unit in the Deputy High Commission, uh, at the time reached out to send two interns to them because they wanted to encourage these young people.

So the idea wasn't for them to come and work, but then he got to the UK Deputy High Commission, and he was the guy everyone went to for spreadsheets. You can imagine. And at some point, they made him an offer to apply for a job at the Deputy High Commission in Abuja. Then he came to me and I was like, "Famous, I, I don't think you want to do this.

The people that are applying for this job are university graduates. Maybe you shouldn't..." I-- Because I didn't want him to be disappointed because one of the things that we also were being careful with was I was promising so much about the power of technology, but I realized I had to be careful. Don't get these young people who are already disappointed with life re-disappointed.

So I sort of encouraged him to go for the interview. But again, I mean, you know, this was a good story for the, for the High Commission. So they sent a car to his house with the CD, core [00:18:00] diplomatic plate number, and he basically said to me, "Even if I don't get this job, they sent a car to my house. I was the envy of the neighborhood in Ajegunle.

They put me on a flight." He got to Abuja, did the interview, but he got a job. I mean, he was, he was literally an Excel guru. He got a job, spent about six months and resigned, which was a weird thing for me. Like, everyone wants a job. Why are you resigning? Uh, but he was paid about 80,000 naira at the time, which was a lot of money, uh, for him.

He saved enough to go to school Famous went to study medical biochemistry in Delta State University, graduated, got a job with KPMG, and became the story in the community like this is, this is what happens to you when you're deliberate about learning technology. And I think that there's a risk of techno solutionism, right?

Of saying that if you learn technology, your life will change. And I'm very careful about that. But I have also seen people who literally had their lives changed because of their [00:19:00] attitude to saying, "You know what? Technology is a challenge to me, to my existence, because without understanding it, I probably, you know, will lose opportunities."

And they grabbed it, and they maximized it.

Alix: Famous sounds like a character. Um, I, I would like to meet him at some point, but I feel like that this human potential is what I'm hearing here, that like working hard doesn't guarantee there's a path to something better, but that there have been these stories that are really animating, and technology has been part of that enabling story of saying like, "You can do these amazing things, and you can be the person at the right time with this new passion and this new skill that people need.

And then, like, you can be, you know, have a life path that your parents might not have had, even if they were exceptional." But it feels like the centrality of people in the AI story is just not as much there. Like, Ojoma, I hear this example of AI, you know, enabling small business owners and, and I think there are definitely examples [00:20:00] where it is meant to complement.

But I'm kind of curious, I mean, turning to you, Chenai, like how do you think about this moment in terms of is it kind of de-centering those stories or does it feel like it's this new wave of opportunity where we're gonna have famous maybe not doing spreadsheets but instead like disrupting in some other way that we can't quite imagine yet?

Chenai Chair: The reality on the African context is you will always find young people who see something, grab it and run. And always the reality is that the people who designed the technology did not think about that, which I think is prob- probably the special source, um, of global majority, particularly on the African continent.

With Masakhane, for example, Masakhane as a community really started from that perspective of we could not see digitized, um, African languages. So people going to international conferences and less than maybe 1% of the room represented African language work that was being done. And so then the response to that was like, "Hey, we wanna see our languages being [00:21:00] represented and we're researchers.

Of course we, you know, we're going to universities where we're not being encouraged to actually look at our own languages. But what we're gonna do is form a collaborative and work together and put out the papers around our African language data sets." And so that's the work that began with Masakhane where it was like, "Okay, no one's doing it.

We're gonna do it and this technology is really cool because then it's talking about natural language processing and machine translation." The approach of how that was done also made it so different where it was a participatory approach where basically it was gathering people, language speakers to verify those data sets that they had found to al- actually also then kind of like add their text and speech into that to then create the data sets that worked in there.

And my favorite story is how when Masakhane won its Wikimedia award in 2021 for a participatory approach in data set creation, they actually got like, I think majority of the people who authored the paper to like have a one [00:22:00] line each because it was a virtual session. So the presentation was like, I say X, the other person says Y, the other s- s- you know, like it goes on and on and like that But it was demonstrating that ability of like, you did not think of me in this design, so I will take it and make it work for me.

And that is the ethos when I think about, um, artificial intelligence. And then of course, there's significantly always the concerns of who's getting left behind, who's not included, who's not t- catered for, and who's seen as more valuable. So this is also then what we then take a look at, like the value chain where with the work that we do, um, as Masakhane is that everybody actually contributes to this work to make it possible.

So our call to action is African-led AI built for impact, and this is around thinking about, you know, you need to have a technologist in the room, you need ... who's the builder. You need to have the sociologist who's thinking about the social nuances. You need to have the linguist who can tell you the politics of language.

You need to have the everyday person who [00:23:00] experiences this as contributing to the key parts of building the system and using the system, not simply as an end user, which we often then, I think when I was talking, reflecting on that experience, it's that the way in which a lot of technology has come to the continent has been from a perspective of like, "You need a phone, here's a phone, you talk to each other."

And then everybody is surprised when, you know, I need a phone, but then that is the, my key mechanism of security, making sure that I call my family member and confirm where they were. They didn't think about it. Thinking about, you know, I need a very well-charged phone battery-wise because then it can also serve as a torch sometimes when the power goes away.

Mm. So those innovative solutions around technology in that way, experiencing it in a way where it comes in one format and then I go forward and use it in a different way. And I think that's also been sort of like, I would say the tension we're navigating with [00:24:00] ensuring African languages are represented in AI, knowing fully well that we speak to each other.

You know, it's best to capture some of these conversations through our devices. How then can we ensure that as people are building innovations that cater for access to information, increased access to, to health services, they're actually in a way, in a tool that people speak, so that if I'm gonna speak Shona to my device and say, "Hey, can you tell me where to go?"

My device will respond to me in a Shona that I understand, not a, a Shona that sounds so robotic and so alien, 'cause that's going to just make me not use it altogether, right? Just to also piggyback on what Ojoma said around the ecosystem building, where for this to also happen when it comes to African languages being adopted, we're also operating in a context where the languages that have been prioritized have been colonizer languages.

So we still have to do this work of actually saying it's important for you to speak your African language in a context where children might still be going to school [00:25:00] and being told you will only speak English and French here And there are very few countries like Ethiopia that, you know, prioritizes Amharic, and then Tanzania that also prioritizes Kiswahili, that allows for people to work in their own languages.

But I don't even want to get into the politics of those national languages as well. So that I think it's, it's, it's suffice to say in thinking about technology and the way that it's done, it's more how do we, how are we designing to take up what's coming onto the continent, and also what we are building from the continent?

'Cause most of the times we build solutions that work for us that other people then scale up, and then we just get erased because people have better marketing, you know? They have bigger marketing budgets. But it's also, I think, important for, for thinking about that experience as, like, a two-way street, and, like, people on this call are the ones that are championing for that.

Like, we are twisting and navigating something that initially was not designed for us, and then now we're working to design it to work within our [00:26:00] context.

Alix: I feel like, Ojoma, given your work in the cultural industries, how do you do in your work this dance that Chenai's talking about, where, you know, receiving the technology and then kind of redirecting the energy into something that is healthy and something that you want to see in the world?

Like, how do, how do you navigate that tension?

Ojoma Ochai: It's really complex to say the least, because in some ways, uh, an in- interesting anecdote is when there were all the strikes in Hollywood about the use of AI in the film value chain, I had... I remember having a conversation with a filmmaker in, in Nigeria and asking them like, "What do you think about this?"

And they're like, "Oh, we love it." Because to them it was additive what AI could do. And the filmmaker I talked to gave me a very specific example, and he talked about the script development process, and he talked about the fact that because budgets for many Nollywood films are limited in comparison to Hollywood film [00:27:00] productions, the script development process was one of the stages in film production that suffered because you couldn't spend that much time or money Workshopping your scripts and doing a lot of work around story development, and he was telling me how with AI, he has almost like an inbuilt script development team because he can do a lot of work around the script.

And so as far as he was concerned, it's additive, and he couldn't understand what them Hollywood guys were going on about. So I think there's also that reality that our perception of some of these technologies vary depending on where we're sitting. Mm-hmm. But that sits in tension, as you rightly say, with the fact that the problem with culture and creativity is not that we're not included in the technological system, it's that we don't take a share of the value or a commensurate share of the value.

So we have a situation where in culture, you create the culture that trains the system, but you don't participate in the economics that that [00:28:00] system then, uh, generates. Or if you come to technology, you can perform the micro work that makes AI possible, but you're at the bottom of the value chain. Or if you go back to the story of a creator, you can have millions of views on a platform, but you have very little control about the distribution or you very little remuneration or very little control over algorithm.

So I think those tensions are tensions that we navigate every day. And so I think where the balance will be found is as we increasingly talk about these changing technologies and culture, we need to move away from just talking about visibility to ownership and to capture of value.

Alix: Mm-hmm.

Ojoma Ochai: And again, back to the ecosystem approach, I think there are roles for multiple stakeholders within this.

There's definitely a role for policy to determine how, how do we want to govern this space in such a way that still allows economic activity to thrive, but that has some equity, that builds in some equity into what's the [00:29:00] minimum benefits that should accrue to people who are creating this culture and these creative products?

At the same time, there's also a market question to say, how do we make sure that we are putting the broader macroeconomic factors in place that make sure that consumption can be monetized locally as well as internationally? But then there's also the infrastructure question around what are the tools that we need to, or levers that we need to put in place?

So in Nigeria, for example, there's a project ongoing, Project Bridge, to build 90,000 kilometers of fiber across the country, which I think will have a profound implication on consumption of local content because then if people have the internet and the economic activity, they can consume local content, and payments means that creators get remunerated and so on and so forth.

So there's definitely a tension, and I think the only solution to that tension is ecosystem players from creators, government, platform owners, and so on working [00:30:00] together to al- uh, agree a shared set of principles and thresholds for how people get back value based on what they create.

Alix: You just blew my mind a little bit.

So what is the timeline on this project? 90,000 kilometers of physical internet infrastructure. That's wild. Sorry, this is a sidebar, but I am very curious. When does this, how long does it take to do that?

Ojoma Ochai: A few years. I was in a, an event yesterday where it was being talked about. So it's about to launch imminently.

All of the funding is in place, the architecture is in place, so literally they're about to start and it will be in phases over the next two or three years, I believe, and it will be completed and so it'll be added in phases. I think it's first 20 or 25,000, thereabout. So it's, it's sort of- Amazing

happening now, essentially.

Alix: It's not like Zuckerberg, is it? It's not like Facebook owned, is it?

Ojoma Ochai: Not at all. It's all led by the Nigerian government. So we can give the government credit for that, um, for once, which I'm very proud of. And, and not least because, uh, my, [00:31:00] a former colleague and co-founder is the Minister for Digital Economy, but it's one of those rare times where you're actually proud of your government for making a choice that may not be popular in the short term, but that will have such a profound impact on how we consume and capture value from any digital-based activity.

'Cause it's not just culture, it's even how do we consume edtech, right? Part of the architecture is connecting schools to this infrastructure so that we can build and consume and just make that highway or that airplane for consuming edtech much more seamless. Or health tech, connecting all hospitals to this infrastructure and building the backbone so that we're capturing, obviously, one, we're participating more, but we're also able to build more value chains and revenue chains on top of this physical infrastructure.

Alix: It's incredible. I mean, I feel like there's a lot of questions that I have about the actual value that AI presents to certain [00:32:00] industries like education and health, but basic digitization and having high-speed connections between hospitals and servers and being able to do, like, like immediate impact on people's everyday lives and immediate impact on the economy, I imagine, um, as well, which has this kind of reverb.

That's, that's incredible. That's so cool. I, I hope those two years go by very quickly. Yeah, go ahead, Ojoma.

Ojoma Ochai: But yeah, yeah. And if I may, I think if you go back to that thing about technology happening to you versus agency, I think for the longest time we've been sold this story of Africa's technology revolution coming from mobile internet.

Mm-hmm. Which in some respects has happened, but it's so limiting.

Alix: Mm-hmm.

Ojoma Ochai: And there is a powerful agency, I think, in looking beyond that narrative and saying, "Actually, hang on a second. What are we missing by being mobile first? And what do we need to change in terms of the infrastructure to overcome [00:33:00] that limitation that has been created as a consequence of us believing that African internet just will stay at that mobile first- Yeah

mobile only or mobile majority?" connection point. And, and, and that's, I, I think back to us saying technology's not happening to us. It's us saying, actually, we will create this thing that allows us participates in a more, much more value-added way.

Alix: They say necessity is the mother of invention, but I think there's also something about scarcity being a mother of invention, and I think there is something really beautiful about what happens when people design systems for low latency devices.

Like, I think it brings out so much creativity and so much resilience development in the systems.

Ojoma Ochai: There's a phrase that I love people have started to say increasingly is, "Just because I'm resilient does not mean I do not deserve ease." Yes. And I feel like we need to be thinking about that a bit more.

Alix: Yes.

Yes. Like, [00:34:00] yes, resilience doesn't mean I should continue to have to be resilient. Like, that's a, yeah, I think that is, like, a very good mantra. So, 'Gbenga, you work on digital literacy and digital rights. Obviously, like, what digital literacy is changes, and obviously how people engage in these technologies has changed as the kind of rights around them and our understanding of the possible harms and kind of the possible ways that we just have to be sharp and have our wits about us when we think about the kind of digital world.

How has the one helped you evolve thinking on the other? I imagine it's kind of mutually evolving.

'Gbenga Sesan: Oh, absolutely. It's gotten to a point where because of the kind of conversations we have, we now clearly say to people that they're not even separate issues, actually. Inclusion is not separate from rights.

So you're talking about literacy. Literacy is a right, and literacy has changed in definition over time. It was a time it was being able to read and write. There was a time it included learning how [00:35:00] to use a computer. But right now, it's more about adaptability, regardless of the tool. It could be AI, it could be IA, it could be SI, since-

Alix: Oh,

'Gbenga Sesan: no

I'm in New York.

Alix: Don't. Don't.

'Gbenga Sesan: And I'm like, "Oh my God. There we go again. Trump strikes." You know, it could be anything. It could be called anything. Uh, but the ability to adapt, to be able to figure the gap between what you need and what's available and be able to bring it together to achieve, achieve, achieve your aim.

Now, the interesting thing with the evolution of, of inclusion, of people learning, of people getting more access to information is they become more aware. A practical example is when people get more knowledge about content production, give them a few days, they will be aware of their data rights because the reality is they will put out content, somebody may use that content the way they don't want, and then they will find out that there's actually a right attached to [00:36:00] every knowledge.

Of course, there's a responsibility attached, but, you know, I leave the challenge of responsibility to all of us. Uh, and I think there's an unfair balance between responsibility and rights right now. I get into these conversations with especially governments all the time, and they're like, "You know, you talk about rights, talk about responsibility."

And I say to them, "Guys, calm down. We have an imbalance." Right now we have a lot more of clampdowns forcing people to become responsible than actually opening up the rights that they need to understand because the reality is if people truly understand and appreciate their rights and are not afraid that you're gonna clamp down on them, there will actually be a more sane environment.

Part of the problem why people react and begin to even share content that you could say is borderline annoying is simply because they feel the constriction, they feel the tightening of the space. Mm-hmm. And I always give the example that every time there is a clampdown on access Whatever you're trying to hide becomes even more popular.

I've had a [00:37:00] whole week of conversations about shutdowns and AI, and our work over the last-- We've, we've done reports over the last, you know, over the last 13 years since 20, you know, 2013 at Paradigm Initiative, and we've seen a trend. The trend is that every time a government shuts down the internet, they make whatever they're trying to hide become popular.

Uh, you know, a very good example, you know, think of Uganda. Uganda shut down Facebook, shut down the internet, and said, "We don't want people sharing election results." That's when the whole world started seeing election results. The same thing happened in Ethiopia. They shut down. They didn't want the whole world to hear about the regional crisis.

Guess what? We didn't know before. Now we know. In fact, my theory is that when you want to make something popular, just, just ban it, you know. And, and, and there's a musician in Nigeria, by the way, called Idris. Uh, I'm sure Ojoma will know him. Idris Abdulkarim, I think is the one who's benefited the most from this.

Every time he releases a song, it gets banned. We, we never knew he released a song, and then it gets banned, and then it becomes... It starts topping the charts, and people are asking, [00:38:00] you know. So there's a, there's a sense of the death, the absence of knowledge that creates a lot more interest in whatever people are trying, are trying to hide.

So w- we've seen knowledge creating an appetite for rights, and at the same time, the more people become aware of their rights, the more they understand the gaps. I mean, a very simple example is what FOI, Freedom of Information laws have done across the continent, and this is what we've seen over the last few year of tracking, that when people become aware of, of those laws, then they use those laws to answer questions that they didn't even know they had.

I was talking about a b- you know, about budget in Nigeria. Before budget People had questions. And then budget came and people realized that, wait a second, we always had those questions, but because there was no platform, there was no tool to help them answer that question, they didn't exactly understand that they had, you know, [00:39:00] that question.

So rights is definitely all about inclusion, and inclusion is all about rights. And, and I, you know, I feel privileged doing work in both areas because, I mean, I've tried to get people in both spaces to talk a lot more to each other. You know, there are traditional human rights people who say, "You know what?

We have to fight for rights and fight for rights." And there are people who, to be honest, don't want to get into trouble, say they don't do anything about human rights and just train people. But what I've seen is a very strong relationship between both. If you have a strong policy environment, if you have an environment where rights are respected, people will become more creative.

And I, I mean, I can't forget my experience many years ago with one of the, well, ex-presidents. We had this, uh, World Economic Forum on Africa in South Africa, and I was talking a lot about young people and technology, and this very old, you know, president looks at me and says, "What is wrong with you?" And he, I mean, he said this into the mic.

Like, "What is wrong with [00:40:00] all you young people?" And he was... I mean, this, this is a larger than life, uh, Mugabe, you know, saying, "Hey, what is wrong with you young people?" You know, I don't even know how I ended up on a panel with him because, you know, whatever. It's, it's the World Economic Forum. They do that.

You were

Alix: on a panel with Mugabe?

'Gbenga Sesan: Yes. Okay. And then he basically goes, "Young people, all of you talk about, you know, this technology thing, but there is no Bill Gates in Africa. Why are young people in Africa just using technology to fight and not become Bill Gates?" And my response, which was very short, uh, changed the entire conversation.

I mean, this is me. I, I don't hide from punches. And I said, "Well, there are young Africans who would become Bill Gates if they were not sent to jail And, and I think he got a message because the tone changed. And when the panel ended, the security guys were quick to whisk him away and give me some kind of look like, "Oh my God, you embarrassed our president."

But that was the truth. A lot, a lot of innovation [00:41:00] is hidden under the rocks of clampdowns and regulation.

Alix: I think a lot about how basically starting from a position of fear almost always leads to the wrong choices, and I think that that is a recurring theme, whether it's regulation or whether it's sort of how people, how parents engage with technology or how basically anyone, if you start from being afraid, it just doesn't lead to good things.

So I want to hear from each of you kind of like a final thought on how you feel vis-a-vis the next, let's say, 10 years. If we think about the balance between, you know, there's exciting things always happening, the world is always changing. All over the African continent, there's always young people who have fantastic ideas and drive to make amazing things happen, and, uh, resilience shouldn't be mandatory.

Uh, survival shouldn't be the goal. But how do you feel in terms of this balance between [00:42:00] opportunities in the next 10 years and possible sort of harms? Like, how do you... I'd love to hear from each of you, like, when we think what happens next. Like, are you optimistic?

Ojoma Ochai: I, I think I'm cautiously optimistic.

Alix: Love that.

Ojoma Ochai: I think the thing that's different now versus before is not so much the absence of constraints, cost of capital or infrastructure or connectivity, institutional capacity. Those are real things, and they remain real things. I think what's different now is the ceiling that was in our imagination about what was possible before is being broken by the new stories and the narratives that we're telling ourselves I think even 10 years ago, a young African was surrounded by stories that told us that technology comes from somewhere else.

We're consumers, we're [00:43:00] beneficiaries, we have no agency, we're workers in somebody else value chain. We're not the people who invent the product. We're not the people who own the IP. We don't write the standards. We don't build the institutions, right? And I think there's a whole world of narratives now from our film to our music, to our journalism that's starting to question th- those stories that have limited our imagination about what's possible.

And I think, uh, to quote the, the, the legendary Bob Marley, we're starting to be e- emancipated from the mental slavery that has held us back about what we can achieve as African people and as a continent. And that's why I'm excited because if we didn't get out of that mental slavery, then it would be just another opportunity to deepen the divide.

And, and that's w- what I hope we can capitalize on to say, if we can dream it and we think it's possible, then we're gonna put in the work regardless of [00:44:00] where in the ecosystem we sit to do the thing that helps us get out of the constraints that hold us back.

Chenai Chair: So I think for me, there's a lot of hope thinking about the opportunities that are gonna emerge based on the reality of like a couple of years ago, you know, Masakhane didn't have a budget.

Masakhane has millions now to invest into the ecosystem. A couple of years ago, you know, we, the idea of internet shutdowns was seen as something that like we couldn't even really track, but now we have Paradigm Initiative writing reports every year that shows the economic impact. So there's the documentation, there's the lessons that are happening, and there's the work being done.

So I stand in this place knowing fully well that like What we have to currently do right now for those of us who are in positions of power and influence and have resources, is to make the work easier for those to come. So, you know, like, yes, the resilience, it- I'm gonna borrow that saying, Ojoma, and, like, use it everywhere around [00:45:00] resilience.

But then it's sort of like in order for me to have this hope that things will be quite, um, impactful in future, is to do the work right now that removes the difficulty in conversations, that thinks about unpacking shared methods of actually responding to realities so that people also don't feel alone.

Because I think sometimes in working in technology, it does feel like you're coming up against such big entities and such big energies, and then, you know, you realize months later that it's just a bunch of white guys who know how to write a statement and it, and sound good. But then you realize actually that there's no substance, and then that's, that's the power of actually bearing down doing the work because you know that it will come through later.

It may not come through right now, but it will come through later, and I think that's, that's one of the key things that's quite important. And I remember when, uh, the minister- like, the current [00:46:00] ministers that we have for technology right now, there are some phenomenal people, right? Like some young phenomena- phenomenal people who understand what it means to build for technology.

They're not cronies. They're not thinking about, like, "Hey, this is a political agenda going forward." We didn't have that a couple of years ago. So it's important then to kind of like, our journey may be slow in some cases, and our journey may be propelled super fast depending on what pandemic is coming around the corner.

But there is that reality that, like, we have to move in a space of, like, that realistic hope that things have continued to change and progress.

Alix: Yeah. Finger.

'Gbenga Sesan: So I'm optimistic, and I need that optimism, uh, to get work done because to be very honest, the environment I work in can be pretty discouraging. And so I need a very healthy dose of, of, of near unnatural optimism to fight through certain things and, and that's why I'm very optimistic about, about the next 10 years as far as, you know, this is concerned.

But on the other hand, I look back the last 10 years, Paradigm Initiative is gonna be [00:47:00] 20 years next year. And, and I look at this 25 years, and what I've seen, especially with young people, is that when you, just when you think that they've reached the peak and all hope is lost, they find a way of breaking through the wall You can call it survival instinct, you can call it, you know, resilience, and I love, you know, uh, Ojoma's quote.

I, I'm, I'm gonna use it for the rest of the week. I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll name-check you, but, but I'm gonna use it for the rest of the week. I mean, we, we've been so, we've become so resilient that people assume that we don't want what we call in Nigeria a soft life, you know, the ease, the ability not to think about when the power is gonna go off, so you have to like, you know, get your clothes pressed and things like that.

I'm, I'm optimistic because we've been here before. Every time there's a new crisis, I go back in history and I check, uh, when we had this funding crisis and everybody went berserk, [00:48:00] and like, "Oh my God, we're not gonna survive this." I'm like, "Guys, you've forgotten 2008, and you've forgotten COVID. We, we went through the same thing."

So for those two reasons, I think I'm optimistic because I have to be. I'm also optimistic because I look at history, and history tells me that people will milk the situation in terms of maximizing opportunities. To be fair, there will be certain things that will happen that will have to challenge. We'll have policy challenges.

We'll have pronouncements by governments, uh, "Oh, we're gonna do this thing, it's gonna be fantastic," that somebody has to stay on it and ask questions. We're gonna have all those challenges of, you know, lack of literacy that somebody's gonna have to work on. But all in all, I think 10 years from now, we're gonna look back and are gonna ask ourselves, "Why were we scared in the first place?"

That's what I hope will happen in 10 years. But guess what? Maybe in 10 years you'll forget we had this conversation, so you won't say I was wrong. [00:49:00]

Alix: Never. Never. I'm hearing, though, that the only person that doesn't get a soft life, um, is politicians, which I appreciate. Uh, I appreciate that about your approach.

A huge thank you to 'Gbenga, Chenai, and Ojoma for joining us. These episodes are part of a broader partnership with Luminate highlighting how activists, researchers, creatives, and organizers around the world are building new visions for how technology can better serve people and society over profit. Head to the link in our show notes to check out the series.

Thank you to the podcast team, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, and Zoe Trout, and to Peter Price at Rethink Audio for all their work making the show happen every week, and we will see you next time.