Navigating the Future of AI in Africa: Cross-Border Governance, Ethics, and Policy Harmonisation

Artificial intelligence (AI) governance in Africa is increasingly shaped by cross-border data flows, shared digital infrastructures, regional trade regimes, and uneven national policy development. This paper examines how African institutions can build a harmonised yet context-sensitive governance framework for AI integration that protects ethics, data sovereignty, and inclusion. Using a structured review and comparative policy analysis, the study draws on a coded corpus of sources published between 2021 and 2026, including African Union and regional policy documents, national strategies, UNESCO and multilateral reports, and peer-reviewed scholarship. The analysis compares governance debates across cross-border coordination, ethics and trust, data sovereignty and interoperability, infrastructure and language inclusion, and sustainability concerns. Findings show that discussion of AI governance in Africa intensified sharply after 2023, with the strongest growth in national strategies, laws, and regulations, indicating that national policy articulation is advancing faster than regional or continental implementation capacity. This study identifies persistent gaps in procurement oversight, interoperable data infrastructures, compute access, language inclusion, and sustainability governance. Thus, Africa should be understood as a multilevel governance space rather than a single market. Therefore, effective harmonisation will require layered governance, stronger public data infrastructure, broader capacity-building, and nationally adaptive implementation aligned with continental and regional coordination.