Academic City University came alive over the weekend as Nyansa Futures, a two-day gathering convened by Beyond AI, brought together more than 200 students, technologists, academics, creatives, and industry leaders on Friday, August 14 and Saturday, August 15, 2026, to interrogate what artificial intelligence really means for Africa — and who gets to decide.

Named after the Akan word for wisdom, Nyansa Futures deliberately set itself apart from the usual technology conference.
Rather than celebrating AI tools, the event asked harder questions: whether AI will serve African people or entrench existing power, whether the continent can build and own its technological future, and what wisdom — nyansa — demands of a generation being told that AI is inevitable.

The highlight of the weekend came on Saturday, when acclaimed Princeton University professor and author Ruha Benjamin delivered a keynote titled “Who Gets to Imagine Africa’s [AI] Future?”

Benjamin, one of the world’s foremost scholars on technology and society, challenged the audience to treat imagination itself as contested territory — warning that tech innovation is not the same as social progress, and urging participants to demand social inputs, not just social impacts.

Drawing connections from undersea cable infrastructure to algorithmic bias, she called on young Africans to unlearn imported assumptions about efficiency and progress, and to build systems accountable to their own communities from the ground up.

“Nyansa Futures exists because Africa cannot afford to be a spectator in the AI era. The wisdom to shape this technology is already here — our job is to gather it, sharpen it, and put it to work,” said Kambale Musavuli, convener of Nyansa Futures.

Two panels, one demand: AI on Africa’s terms
The opening panel, “AI for the People — or Just the Powerful?”, confronted the politics of access and inclusion. It featured Nana Yaw Amoako, Technical Program Manager at Huawei; Michael Owusu-Asare, disability inclusion consultant, social entrepreneur, and founder of No Limit Consult and the No Limit Foundation; and Margaret Akua Barden, TV and radio presenter, AI trainer and consultant. The conversation ranged from who is being left out of the AI economy to how inclusion must be designed in from the start — not retrofitted.

A second panel, “Can Africa Build AI on Its Own Terms?”, took on frugal innovation, African capability, and technological ownership. Panellists Xiong Jie (Jeff), General Secretary of the Global South Academic Forum; Ato Ulzen-Appiah, Director of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem at Academic City University and Director of the GhanaThink Foundation; John Kweku Aacht, Founder and CEO of CloudFruition; and Désiré Elese Lokoy, CEO of Aether Strategies, examined how Africa can build useful, affordable, and sustainable AI within its own
realities — uneven connectivity, high computing costs, and scarce local datasets — through efficient models, shared infrastructure, Global South cooperation, and locally governed data.

A platform, not a one-off
Organisers say Nyansa Futures is designed as a continuing platform for critical, creative engagement with emerging technology in Africa, with follow-up programming and future editions in view.