Today we count 27 countries that have passed regulations referring to Artificial Intelligence including Indonesia, Egypt, Morocco, India, Rwanda Tunisia, and many others. The OECD has developed a useful live repository of AI Policies and strategies available for public consultation.

Countries are adopting different approaches in developing their AI strategies.

For example:

Brazil and Indonesia AI strategies emphasizes on innovation and long-term vision by building capacity to achieve AI readiness.

Egypt on the other hand looks at AI as a catalyst for development and as a tool that could serve to solve socio-economic challenges.

In conclusion, developing countries should forge their own approaches to AI regulation and focus on their core needs and challenges as opposed to simply replicate the EU and US approaches. Furthermore, they should ensure that such regulations provide sufficient safety measures and guardrails against misinformation and bias.

Developing countries should use a different strategy instead of merely replicating the EU or US regulatory approaches and focus on their core needs and challenges. Review Mo’s article “Beyond Risk and Self-Regulation: AI Readiness Policies for Developing Countries” which covers these important issues.

On Diversity and Inclusion

There is focus on transparency in terms of how decisions are made as well as the outcome otherwise we will end up with black boxes which is currently the case in many instances today.

Algorithms- based decisions should be fair and should not have bias built in them. We want to make sure that these inequalities do not translate to the AI world.

AI laws and regulations should be developed in multistakeholder, democratic environment that includes the civil society, the academia, government, and the industry. Everyone should be engaged.

People should look at their local agencies and government and ensure their voices are heard.

We need to know how decisions are made to achieve a fair outcome on our daily lives. Everyone think that at AI as a technology will impact their lives heavily and therefore, we need to pay attention to how it is developed.

On challenges facing Developing countries in adopting AI

Developing countries face several challenges in adopting AI: lack of advanced computing resources, which are very expensive, digital literacy, lack of robust data governance frameworks and gaps in AI investment, and support to startups and SMES among others.

However, two main challenges stand out:

1. Talent shortage: most countries face a brain drain with talent migrating elsewhere such as Mo. The national talent pool is deficient. One way to overcome this challenge is to start institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technologies (IITs), partnership between companies and government by developing advanced courses. Another such institution is the African institute for Mathematical Scienceswhich covers a variety of disciplines including AI.
2. Research and development – Developing countries face financial constraints in research and development. In term of size and opportunity, countries such as Nigeria which has a robust and thriving technology ecosystem, Nigerian contribution to R&D was 0.1% of its GDP in 2022 while GDP was $ 1.5 billion. There is a huge gap to be filled.  Public Private Partnership (PPP) are a way forward to fill those gaps.

Reemphasizing that the EU and US approaches to AI Regulation might not be the most suitable to many countries. Each Government needs to start a multistakeholder participatory process to use AI efficiently and to flourish.

The views expressed in this article are Mohamed El Bashir personal opinion and not his employer’s