Lavina Ramkissoon, Africa’s AI Mom: ‘In our countries, many innovations are born out of necessity’

Lavina Ramkissoon, 47, moves like a fish in water through the infinite aisles of GITEX Africa, the region’s massive technology fair, which took place in Marrakech in April. Ramkissoon is the African Union ambassador for the east, north, and south of the continent and seems to know everyone: top big tech executives, constantly brainstorming visionaries, and designers of a distinctly African digital future.

Her work consists of advising 27 African countries on projects with a common denominator: using digital technology as a lever for change. She studied computer science in South Africa and completed her education at Harvard with postgraduate degrees in business and artificial intelligence. She explains that a few years ago, a group of African women nicknamed her “Mama AI” because they found her last name difficult to pronounce. She embraced the nickname and turned it into her personal brand. In Africa’s digital ecosystems, Ramkissoon is now known as the AI Mom.

The nickname also has a personal dimension. Ramkissoon says her two daughters started coding at the age of eight and, by 13, earned an IBM scholarship to study quantum computing — a field they introduced her to and one she now finds fascinating, especially for its potential to inspire dystopian scenarios where machines take control. For Ramkissoon, technology in general — and AI in particular — are powerful tools for massive expansion that must be kept on a tight leash. Under control, whether in its simplest or most complex form, digital technology can be the engine for a great leap forward for Africa.

Question. How can AI help with development in Africa?

Answer. In a thousand ways. I like to give examples that make its potential tangible. There’s a young man in Uganda who, at 16 years old, created an AI app that helped his grandmother get better performance from their family farm, using information on crops, harvests and meteorology. It worked so well that other farmers in the area began to use it, also with excellent results. In Africa, innovations born out of necessity abound.

Q. Is agriculture the sector that can most benefit?

A. I’d say it’s the second, after health, where technology can help enormously to optimize scarce resources. In Zambia, they’re completely digitalizing their health system to improve efficiency in access to facilities and the dispensation of medicine, particularly in rural areas.

Q. Are there structural problems that African countries need to resolve so that this technology can reach its full potential?

A. In Africa, just like everywhere else, technology operates in expanded ecosystems and requires multidimensional approaches to reap the most benefit from it. AI can help us save energy and reduce food waste. Imagine a system in which we know, in real time, the supply of a certain grain, let’s say wheat. Let’s say Nigeria has a surplus and Ghana has a deficit. We could meet that need with maximum agility. But to do so, we would have to make progress when it comes to the free movement of goods and people. AI is a tool that allows us to expand, that improves us, but always with human beings holding the brush as artists at work, as authors.

Q. Could optimism about AI’s potential for social impact encourage African leaders to drive digital transformation?

A. I hope so. It is certainly pushing us as a continent to reflect on how we can use this new tool to maximize social benefits. It is an extra motivation.

Q. Is there a risk that we’ll be dazzled by AI and that will cause us to discard less sophisticated, but perhaps more effective tools, in certain contexts?

A. What comes to mind is mobile money [economic transactions via text message that are very popular in sub-Saharan Africa], which arose on the continent to deal with deficiencies in internet connectivity and has allowed money to flow more freely. It’s a system based on an infrastructure that, today, we consider almost rudimentary. It has improved the lives of millions of Africans who don’t have a bank account or stable access to the internet.

Q. Is there a truly African approach to addressing the gender gap in technology training and professions?

A. A recent UNESCO study said that for every 100 African men with Excel training, there were 40 women. We have a lot of work to do. In the political sphere, progress has been notable. There are many female ministers in African governments and there are beginning to be female presidents, most recently in Namibia [Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, who began her term in March]. But we have to bring that change down to earth and extend it to the rest of the population, especially in the scientific-technological field. Perhaps a truly African approach could come from putting our faith in youth [70% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa is less than 30 years old] as the basis of development for the continent: giving a young man or woman a computer with internet connection and waiting for the unexpected to happen.

Q. Is it arrogant to think that technology could be the solution to, for example, climate change, which is taking such a high toll on Africa?

A. That’s almost an existential question, with pressing dilemmas: humanity depending on technology to solve its problems, versus technology using us to evolve itself. Or, humans becoming increasingly robotized and AI becoming increasingly humanized. To avoid getting bogged down, we need to return to a fundamental view of humans as inherently optimistic and kind beings. And we must not forget that we are in control and that climate dystopia is a choice. The paradox is that we have the technology to stop the destruction of the planet, but at the same time, we believe that we have lost the battle.

Q. Is that perhaps due to the profound systematic changes to our way of life that facing the threat would imply?

A. For all of our virtues, human beings tend towards complacency and comfort, towards thinking in the short term and assuming that someone in the future will fix the mess we’re currently making. We have to find equilibrium in our relationship with nature and not limit ourselves to inventing electric cars to reduce emissions and selling carbon credits to corporations. Faced with the scenario of losing control of the planet or of technology that we created, I insist on humankind’s capacity to decide every day, at all times.

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