Huawei’s seventh annual ICT Editors Xchange in Johannesburg convened under the theme “Africa’s Intelligence, Africa’s Terms” to explore how the continent is building AI for its own realities.
The event brought together speakers from Huawei, academia and business to consider African AI, local data, indigenous-language education, and the cloud infrastructure needed to support it.
Opening the programme, Huawei South Africa deputy-CEO Charles Cheng said Africa should define the terms of its own intelligence, rather than inherit them. “African intelligence, African terms means systems that are trained on our realities and designed for our needs,” he said. “It means innovation that works with small businesses, schools, hospitals, researchers, entrepreneurs and public institutions.”
He said the next chapter of Africa’s digital transformation would be driven by cloud, AI, connectivity, secure networks, data infrastructure and talent. “It means ownership of the platforms, and autonomy over the questions we ask, the problems we choose to solve, the data we use, the languages we include and the value we create,” Cheng said.
Digital futurist Nicky Verd followed with a keynote titled “The Future Belongs to the Adaptable,” arguing that Africa’s AI advantage lies in its ability to adapt quickly rather than being constrained by legacy systems. Citing Kodak and Nokia, Verd said the greatest risk is complacency, not technology.
She described the ‘Titanic mindset’ of businesses that believe they are too big to sink, and warned that the bigger risk is personal, “the real threat isn’t just job loss. It is becoming mentally obsolete while you are still employed.”
AuraaAfrica founder and CEO Gift Lubele emphasised that AI must be trained on African data to serve African users. “I realised that 94% of all AI music models are trained on Western data. African data is 0.04%, not even 1%,” Lubele said. “If we don’t include ourselves in these AI models, we cease to exist.”
He founded AuraaAfrica to help close that gap and recently won the Grand Innovation Prize at Huawei’s Code4Mzansi developer competition from 1,040 entries. His closing challenge: “Let us move away from consumption as an African continent. Let us now be creators of data.”
Dr Olaperi Okuboyejo of the University of Pretoria explained how AI can support learning when it is delivered in the languages African students actually speak. She set out the paradox in South African education: a record 88% matric pass rate and the largest-ever cohort, alongside a deep early-learning crisis. “81% of Grade 4 learners in South Africa cannot read for meaning in any language.”
She linked this partly to a language switch that pushes children into English instruction when only a small fraction speak it at home. Dr Okuboyejo said mainstream AI tools still perform poorly in African languages and highlighted her lab’s work on indigenous-language datasets and pan-African language models.
Grounding the discussion in infrastructure, Huawei Cloud South Africa’s Director of Cloud Solutions Sales, Calvin Huang, explained the cloud and computing layers that African AI ambitions depend on. Huang traced a rapid shift from generative to agentic to physical AI, citing Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei’s view that AI may be “the last technological revolution in human society.” He said the economic opportunity is equally significant, with AI investment projected to reach $810-billion by 2028.
According to Huang, South Africa still faces challenges around deployment, cost and data sovereignty. He said Huawei is addressing these challenges through open AI systems, local infrastructure and industry partnerships. Huawei’s AI infrastructure is now live in its Johannesburg region, the same infrastructure Lubele is using to train his music models.
Huang pledged that Huawei would be “a closer, faster and more affordable infrastructure provider to South African customers” and “a long-term partner in this journey.”
The closing panel drew Lubele, Verd, Okuboyejo and Huang around a single question: how can Africa ensure it is not only included in the AI era, but actively shaping the intelligence that will define its future? Lubele warned that the opportunity is time-bound: “We have a window to catch up with the world, and that window is closing if we don’t use it.” He said merely consuming AI tools sends money and intellectual property out of the continent.
Huang conceded that African users remain “more like consumers of AI, not builders.” Responding to challenges raised from the audience by Dr Jabera Matogoro of the University of Pretoria, the panel closed on a shared conviction: that education is where Africa’s AI future will be decided.
The 2026 Editors Xchange affirmed that the continent’s AI future will be strongest when it is built on Africa’s own data and priorities, and taught in its own languages. Across the discussions, speakers returned to the same conviction: intelligence built on Africa’s terms is not only possible but already underway.