Youth must help shape Age of Intelligence

I have spent much of my career working at the intersection of technology, policy, and development across Africa and beyond. During that time, I have observed how each wave of technological change reshapes opportunity, and determines who has it, who creates it, and who gets left behind.

What we are witnessing today is not just another technology cycle but a profound shift from the Information Age to the Age of Intelligence, where intelligence itself is becoming a factor of production. It will influence how economies grow, how public services are delivered, how societies organise themselves, and how young people find work, meaning and mobility.

For Kenya and much of Africa, this is a question of whether a young continent will help build the future or be forced to live inside systems designed elsewhere.

That is why the digital divide can no longer be discussed only in terms of connectivity but also an opportunity divide. If left unaddressed, it could harden into a permanent exclusion of millions of young Africans from the engines of modern prosperity. In a country like Kenya, where the majority are young, that would be a policy failure and a betrayal of national promise.

The numbers already point to both progress and urgency. Internet access in Eastern Africa remains among the lowest in the world, even as demand for digital tools rises sharply. Kenya has moved further than many of its peers, but movement is not the same thing as readiness.

Connecting people is now an economic necessity that determines how nations widen opportunity, strengthen social mobility and prepare their citizens for a world in which intelligence itself shapes production and power.

Around the world, a consensus is beginning to form around the fact that countries that will lead in this era will not necessarily be those that adopt new tools first. They will be those that build systems that enable their people to design, create and solve problems using those tools. That distinction means Africa cannot afford to be merely a consumer of intelligence built by others but must become a producer of ideas, applications and solutions rooted in its own realities.

There are signs that this is possible through partnerships among governments, private companies and development actors who are already proving that digital transformation can produce results. One example is Huawei’s DigiTruck program – a mobile classroom, converted from a shipping container and equipped with computers and internet connectivity and is designed to deliver digital skills training to underserved and remote communities across Kenya. The program equips equipping young people with practical competencies in ICT, online work, digital entrepreneurship, cybersecurity, and e-learning.

In Kenya and elsewhere, practical training models are showing what happens when technology and skills are brought closer to communities. Young people who might otherwise see innovation as something distant and elite begin to imagine themselves differently. They gain not just technical skills, but also confidence that turns them into creators, entrepreneurs and problem solvers.

But confidence alone will not carry a continent into the future. If Africa is serious about participating in the age of intelligence, it must invest in solid foundations such as reliable energy, affordable connectivity, access to computing power, trusted datasets, safe testing environments, strong governance and institutions that can inspire trust. Without those foundations, talk of inclusion will not change anything.

Africa enters this new era with more leverage than it often admits. Its minerals power the hardware, its data helps train the models and its young people are building applications and generating practical use cases. Yet that advantage could easily be squandered if the value created from those resources, skills and experiences is captured elsewhere. The question is not whether Africa has a stake in the AI economy but whether it will capture that value for its youth or surrender it.

This is why skills must be treated as infrastructure. Skills turn access into opportunity, and connectivity into productivity. They are the bridge between aspiration and sovereignty.

There is also the deeper issue that intelligence systems do not simply process information but also interpret reality. They shape what is visible, what is valued and what is ignored. If Africa’s youth do not help build the systems that will increasingly organise public and private life, they will inherit a future explained in languages, assumptions and priorities that are not their own.

Ultimately, future will belong to those who are able not only to use intelligence, but to shape it. Africa’s youth must not stand at the edge of that future as spectators but must be in the room, in the code and in the design. That is the choice before us, and it must be made deliberately, collectively and now.

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Mr Thigo is Kenya's Special Envoy for Technology to the United Nations.