How AI Is Quietly Rewriting the Global Internet, and Why Africa Must Pay Attention

By Vinothkumar Kolluru

When you unlock your phone in Lagos, Nairobi, or Kigali, your screen seems familiar: prices shift, loan offers appear and vanish, and videos rearrange themselves before you finish scrolling. It feels like normal digital life. But those changes aren’t random. They’re decisions made by artificial intelligence systems that watch every swipe and pause, then reshape your screen to keep you scrolling, buying, or borrowing.

These invisible systems are rapidly becoming the real architects of the internet. And for Africa’s hundreds of millions of mobile users, their influence is growing far faster than public awareness or regulation.

The Web Is No Longer Static; It Learns From You

When you scroll Instagram in Accra or shop on Jumia in Abuja, you’re not just seeing a page someone designed months ago. You’re interacting with AI that learns from your behavior in real time.

International bodies, including the OECD and Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, have documented this shift: platforms now personalize content, rank results, and shape user choices through systems that adapt continuously rather than follow fixed rules. The OECD’s report Artificial Intelligence in Society describes how algorithms increasingly drive personalization at scale, while Stanford HAI’s research highlights “adaptive” systems that modify layouts, recommendations, and search results based on micro-signals: the hesitation before a click, the rapid return to the previous page, and the sudden pause during checkout.

Major platforms used heavily in Africa admit as much in their documentation. In its Transparency Center, Meta explains that constantly updated ranking models govern Facebook and Instagram feeds. Google’s Search documentation acknowledges that interaction data influences the order of results. YouTube has publicly described how engagement signals drive which videos appear in your recommendations.

The shift is profound: the internet is no longer something you simply view. It is something that responds to you silently and instantly.

Africa’s Digital Boom Meets Invisible Algorithms

Sub-Saharan Africa is in the middle of a historic digital surge. The GSMA Mobile Economy Sub-Saharan Africa 2023 report estimates that mobile technologies and services already generate more than 8% of the region’s GDP, with mobile subscribers heading into the hundreds of millions as 3G, 4G, and now 5G coverage expand.

At the same time, the African Union’s Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020–2030) warns that most of the digital infrastructure and AI tools shaping Africans’ online experiences are designed and governed elsewhere. The strategy calls explicitly for “Africa’s ownership of modern tools of digital management” to safeguard digital sovereignty.

To see why such an effort matters, look at where AI touches African lives most directly: money.

Your Loan App says It Knows You, but Who Taught It to Think?

Grace (not her real name), a shopkeeper in Nairobi, applied for a small mobile loan last year through an app she’d used many times before. She’d repaid every loan she’d ever taken. This time, the response was instant: “System decision: declined.” No explanation. No human to call. No way to appeal.

She still doesn’t know whether she was flagged because of her transaction pattern, her location, her phone type, or some other pattern an algorithm didn’t like.

Her story is part of a much bigger pattern. A recent review of AI in African mobile money and digital lending, published in the Newport International Journal of Current Issues in Arts and Management, found that services like M-Pesa, M-Shwari, and Fuliza in Kenya, and Paga, Carbon, and OPay in Nigeria, rely heavily on AI models that analyze transaction histories, phone usage, and other behavioral signals to score credit, manage risk, and personalize offers. These systems have extended microloans and overdraft facilities to millions of people who were invisible to traditional banks, but they also introduce new risks of bias and opaque exclusion.

And the scale is enormous. In 2024, the Digital Financial Services Association of Kenya (DFSAK) reported that nearly 8 million Kenyans accessed digital loans each month, totalling about 15 billion shillings in monthly lending, much of it driven by automated credit decisions. That estimate, cited by financial news outlet Ecofin Agency, shows how deeply algorithms are now embedded in everyday finance. Ecofin’s report is here.

AI has unlocked financial services for millions who were invisible to the old system. But it has also created new gatekeepers, ones that work in code, not branches, and answer to predictive models, not appeals.

Africa Is Beginning to Shape Its Own AI Future

African institutions are not standing still.
In 2024, the African Union adopted a Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy, framing AI as a “strategic asset” for achieving Agenda 2063 and calling for ethical, inclusive, and human-centric deployment. The strategy builds on AUDA-NEPAD’s earlier report, AI for Africa: Artificial Intelligence for Africa’s Socio-Economic Development, which urges African governments to align AI use with local priorities in agriculture, health, education, and public services, not just import foreign business models.

At the national level, Nigeria’s Data Protection Act 2023 explicitly recognizes automated decision-making, giving citizens the right to know when significant decisions are made solely by machines and to challenge those outcomes. Kenya and South Africa have similar protections in their data-protection regimes, though enforcement still lags behind practice.

African researchers are also shaping the debate. In her essay What Is AI Governance? An African Response, Rachel Adams argues that AI “cannot be treated as a neutral tool” and lays out a governance cycle for African states: map existing laws, identify gaps, design context-specific rules, and build public accountability, instead of simply copying European or American templates.

The message is clear: Africa is not just absorbing global AI. It is starting to define its own terms.

Three Concrete Steps Africa Should Take Now

Good strategies and laws, however, must translate into protections people can feel, including people like Grace.

First, regulators should require clear disclosure whenever AI is making or heavily influencing high-stakes decisions such as credit approvals, pricing, or eligibility. An AI-decision icon, like a nutrition label on food packaging, could show when algorithms are in charge and link to a simple explanation of what that means.

Second, companies operating in African markets, from local fintech startups to global platforms, should be obliged to publish AI impact assessments for their most consequential systems. These assessments should explain, in straightforward terms, what data is used, what outcomes are optimized, and how people can seek redress when things go wrong. The AU’s AI strategy and emerging regional initiatives provide a solid foundation; the next step is to mandate this disclosure, rather than making it optional.

Third, civil society needs to treat AI literacy as part of basic digital literacy. Users don’t need to become programmers. But they should know that a “system decision” is not divine judgment; it is a model that can be contested. Teaching people how to recognize when they’re being profiled, nudged, or optimized should sit alongside teaching them how to spot phishing emails and fake news.

African users already live inside systems that learn from them, predict them, and, increasingly, decide for them. The question is no longer whether AI shapes what Africans see online; it does. The real question is whether Africa will help design the rules of this new internet or simply learn to live with them after the fact.