COMPUTATIONAL INVISIBILITY: Architectural Constraints on Institutional Intelligence in African Public Sector Data Systems
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This paper proposes a conceptual and diagnostic framework for understanding a recurring pattern of information architecture failure in African public-sector institutions. The framework introduces computational invisibility — an architectural condition in which operational data exists within an institutional system but remains structurally inaccessible for decision-making, prediction, or automation. Drawing on institutional observation in Sub-Saharan African public-sector contexts, the paper argues that fragmentation, unstructured data formats, and computational inaccessibility represent three observable expressions of a shared architectural condition rather than independent engineering problems. Four contributing causes are identified, including a previously unnamed dynamic termed epistemic invisibility: the condition in which institutions lack the conceptual reference point to recognize what operational intelligence their data could produce. The paper introduces the Data Architecture Index (DAI) as a proposed staged diagnostic architecture, assessing institutional data readiness across three tiers — field presence, computability, and preliminary signal assessment. DAI is a preliminary framework requiring future empirical operationalization. It is explicitly distinguished from the Global Information Index (GII) of Ndapasowa and Chibaya (2025): DAI evaluates architectural readiness for computation; GII evaluates informational signal capacity once computational prerequisites are satisfied. Architectural
readiness and informational signal are analytically distinct conditions. Information theory — including Shannon entropy and Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety — is
employed as an interpretive lens rather than a source of formal theorems. The paper's contribution is synthetic, architectural, and diagnostic, grounded in African
public-sector institutional observation and positioned within African institutional systems discourse.