Africa's War On Misinformation With Abdullahi Alim And Nolita Mvunelo THE CLUB OF ROME podcast

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Africa's war on misinformation with Abdullahi Alim and Nolita Mvunelo

21d ago 25:53

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Africa is on the frontline of a fast-moving battle against digital misinformation, one with profound effects for politics, trust and daily life.

In this episode of We Kinda Need a Revolution, host Nolita Mvunelo talks to Abdullahi Alim, award-winning economist and CEO of the Africa Future Fund, about how social media, YouTube rumours, deepfakes and adversarial AI are reshaping the continent, often out of the global spotlight.

From election hoaxes to ethnic divisions stoked online, they highlight the unique and urgent challenges confronting the continent and the lack of accountability from major tech platforms.

But the conversation is also about hope: practical solutions like investing in education, boosting community resilience and creating spaces for honest, offline dialogue.

Drawing on his own journey from Somalia to a different life in Australia, Abdullahi reflects on how lived experience shapes his vision of the risks and opportunities Africa faces in the digital age.

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Full transcript:

Nolita: While the world's attention is often elsewhere, Africa is facing a digital war on misinformation. Nations across the continent are facing a quieter but equally dangerous battle for the truth in the age of social media and AI, one that is reshaping politics trust and power. Welcome to We Kinda Need a Revolution, a special series of the Club of Rome Podcast where we explore bold ideas for shaping sustainable futures. I am Nolita Mvunelo, and today I'm speaking to Abdullahi Alim, an award-winning economist and CEO of the Africa Future Fund. Abdullahi is a leading voice on how disinformation and adversarial AI are reshaping power and trust. These are ideas that he examines in his foreign policy essay, how Africa's war on disinformation can save democracies everywhere. In this episode, we dive into the war on misinformation in Africa and ask, what risks lie ahead, what role are young people playing, and what will it take to build resilience and reclaim the digital space? Let's explore what's at stake and what's possible.

Hi, how are you doing? Thank you so much for joining us today.

Abdullahi: I'm good. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Nolita.

Nolita: Our discussion today is going to be on Africa's war and disinformation, but before we get into that, can you please tell us more about yourself and what led you into considering some of these challenges and these potentially existential risks?

Abdullahi: I think every idea needs to be drawn back to its origins, and that also holds for me as a person too. I was born in 1992 in Somalia, and I am of the children of that initial conflict that earned Somalia, the unfortunate nickname of a failed state. And I think going from that early childhood experience in in Somalia to eventually where we settled in Australia, in a more low income bubble when you are a product of failed systems, be it, examples of systems of migration, systems of transportation, systems of housing, you have no choice but to think deeply about how those systems operate to advantage some people and how they operate to disadvantage others. So, I think I've always been a deeply reflective person, even from a young age, and I take that with great responsibility, because my story isn't the norm. I'm the exception to the norm, having had the life that I've had so far, and I want to use that responsibly. And I think that starts not so much with solving things, but asking the right questions, and that's why I lend myself better to systemic issues, systemic fault lines, like what we're about to discuss today.

Nolita: So as a start, may you please take us through the challenge and the landscape?

Abdullahi: Sure. So I think when we think of disinformation, we think of it through a US Eurocentric lens, largely because it's language borrowed from the west. When we think about the large disinformation campaigns that pique media interest, we're usually talking about events that's around the US election, or perhaps proxy conflicts taking place in Europe between pro-Russian voices and pro NATO voices. But the world of disinformation actually expands beyond that, and I think it gets the least amount of attention in Sub Saharan Africa. Least amount of attention, but some of the most profound impacts. Why? Because, I think for the most part, identity on the continent is still delineated against clan, religious and ethnic lines. So, somebody could be of X nationality, but at the same time, they may have an additional loyalty, especially when conflict comes to rise. At a more granular level, the loyalty again, could be to their ethnic group, it could be to their religious group. It could be to their clan. Now, when you have an unregulated landscape of that sort, and when you have less sort of resources deployed by the big tech companies who have a large monopoly in the information highway in these parts of the world, what it means is that those regions, and principally Africa, in this moment, is most vulnerable and most at risk to the kind of disinformation tactics which seem quite analogue relative to what we typically think of disinformation. It really could just be somebody edited to look like they've said something when they haven't. It could be a court attributed to a particular leader of a group, any of those forms of misappropriated text or deep fakes, anything from one end to the other, can have real life ramifications.

Nolita: Do you have any like specific examples or cases where this has happened and what has the impact been? I say this also, like in the current context, where there is a lot of conflict right now, is that at the same time, Africa doesn't get the same type of global attention at times of conflict.

Abdullahi: I think the example that I can give again would be in Ethiopia, because it sort of happened at the worst possible time when the conflict in Tigray broke out in Ethiopia. And of course, this has been brewing for some time. I think it came off the backs of a lot of. Tech companies culling their trust and safety teams, budgets, councils. And what you had was one moderator, for example, for every let's say I'm giving an arbitrary figure here, just to sort of give you the scale one per million of population, so that really when you, when you reduce her to that level, you're never going to be at the scale necessary to be able to tackle this issue. We saw examples in Ethiopia where one faction would basically share an image of a leader from another particular faction. This is, again, was based on ethnic lines, saying a particular, particularly provocative statement against them, or suggesting that they were about to incite violence, which they never did. It got so bad that it reached the stage where that particular misappropriated community leader from the other group was killed off the backs of this misassumption. Now, when you look at the death toll in the Tigray conflict, clocking something around 600,000 people, you cannot disassociate that from social media and the role of disinformation in this particular form of warfare.

Nolita: So then I sense that there's an element of accountability and infrastructure, like what is available for governments or maybe even people to, you know, hold platforms accountable for the lack of infrastructure, like the lack of moderation, etc, but also who chooses what gets moderated, what is right, what is wrong, what can be shared, what can't be shared. Are there any initiatives, even at the state level or even at the international organisation level, that are addressing some of these challenges?

Abdullahi: Most of the efforts now are calling for more moderation, which would have worked a few years ago, but in the age of AI, actually, it's it's going to prove quite inconsequential. I'll tell you why. So I could literally put out propaganda that calls for and incites violence against even an individual, let alone a particular group, and in such a way that I use the latest, what we call adversarial AI, to change and augment the detail of the image from the back end in such a minute way that the naked eye won't see the difference. But a machine might misread as something completely different. So it might read it as, oh, that's a rose, or that's something that isn't inflammatory. So imagine that at scale. So the question then becomes, where do we go from here? Now, unfortunately, the AI ecosystem is quite closed around the world. A lot of these big companies are running closed models. We're outsourcing this huge responsibility to smaller teams behind these tech companies, who, for the most part, don't have the incentive and may not have the interdisciplinary expertise to be able to tackle this issue at their core. So that, I think is the number one issue at the moment is that we've got closed innovation ecosystems that as these problems get more and more advanced, these disinformation tactics become more and more advanced, it actually shuts the door from a global community of experts, both technical and non-technical, being able to come to the table to figure out how to counter that from an algorithm perspective, and we're outsourcing this important duty and responsibility to smaller and smaller companies whose main incentives is really just to win the AI race, as it's called. And so I think who bears the cost? Unfortunately, it will be the continent. It will fortunately be parts of the world that don't have that. Don't have that same level of fluency with these kind of more advanced disinformation campaigns. I also think nalita, we're paying the costs for decades long poor education systems and decades long lack of investments, lack of even just community spaces to heal divides, to create spaces where tension will arise when you bring up narratives and experiences, lived experiences in particular, but not doing it unfortunately means that those issues fester to the point where, when a new medium emerges that's able to sort of take prey on that it resurfaces at a way that we're unable to sort of tackle it, as much as if we were actually looking at the issue from its core. So I'm concerned because disinformation is evolving at a technically rapid rate. The tech companies are becoming more closed, which means that other experts aren't able to figure out the exact inner workings of these models that are being co opted and as a consequence, how to sort of counter them from a technical perspective. And at the same time, we're becoming less and less invested in the social in the educational systems that would have made us more resilient to start with,

Nolita: There is a paper that I read. It was a paper about systemically transforming governance and the development space. And they speak about deliberative spaces that for for there to be new models of governance, you need to have more spaces where there is deliberation around what country are we trying to become? What feature are we trying to create?

Abdullahi: To add to your point, because I think it's an important one about creating deliberate spaces to host these courageous conversations. I also think it's even more important for relatively, quote, unquote. New countries. Our borders are not real, but they are our current reality. So we have to sort of contend with the current moment and create spaces to almost talk as if we are a new ecosystem, 54 of which make up this continent. So unless you are intentional about creating those spaces, these issues will go unchecked, they will fester, they'll go underground, and they'll resurface in ways that a political voice of this future, an opportunist, maybe from another space, can really just set that on fire.

Nolita: It's ripe with opportunists. I think, I think it's become less of a conversation of whose ideas are most likely to be able to lead people, and more about who is more likely to capture the attention of people. I think I've fallen to the AI misinformation videos, because one is that, think it's the latest Google update where the videos look really realistic. And there was like a geese caster standing next to a big pothole, and she was like, Yo, you know, infrastructure problems in Kenya, and then, and then the lady just falls in. And I was like, Oh, my God, the roads are so bad in Kenya. And I actually, like, just like I listened to that, I moved on, and then I saw a similar video about Ukraine, and I was like, okay, that means the other one was false. Growing up, it's like the young people know technology. I didn't know it's going to be on the old people without understanding technology side so quickly,

Abdullahi: But it's how we engage with social media. It's at the click of a finger, so you're not really dedicating too much bandwidth to literally, like, delineate between what's real and what's fake. So very quickly, you could just assume that anything.

Nolita: Obviously public opinion then changes based on that right like, if someone had seen that video, and they didn't see the UK version, and they were just like, oh, wow, the roads here are so bad. I can definitely see myself changing who I vote for, just based off of that, being like, that lady almost died in that pothole. But the point I'm alluding to is that, like, technology is changing politics. So you made a point earlier, that there it is increasing the chance of conflict, like there is violent conflict happening at the hands of misinformation and disinformation, but it's also just like entirely changing the landscape of how even democratic elections are turning out, like South Africa's last election, someone probably could credibly say that this was the first Youtube election, like there was so many YouTube Interviews by politicians making their case, etc, endeared me to some people made me even more convicted as to why I don't like certain people. Is there research happening about how these modalities are trans like, these different formats are transforming how elections happen?

Abdullahi: Um, I think there's a growing Pan African ecosystem of fact-based reporting, which I think is taking more and more interest, taking more and more shape. I think the challenge nowadays, and this might sound harsh for the continent, but I don't think social media shapes politics. I actually think culture is the ultimate point of reference. Everything else is the derivative. So you are only susceptible to this extent, to this extent if you are truly a set of communities that lack resilience. And that becomes the broader question, I think that becomes the question that we need to sort of tackle. And unfortunately, those questions don't get as much attention because scalability is it becomes a secondary question, like, how do you scale resilience if they require so much offline engagement?

Nolita: What does it mean to be culturally resilient? What would it take like tangibly, also?

Abdullahi: I think it's to know your identity intimately. We have complex stories where in some parts of the continent, we are the descendants of those who obviously endure a great amount of conflict, and that becomes almost like a shared trauma. There's such power in creating space for that, but there's also shared power in also creating spaces for ways in which we are descendants of folks who also contributed to conflicts and really sitting in that discomfort. But unfortunately, unless you go down to that nuance of saying, I also come from a part where the conflict was a result of what my community did, and I'm able to take stock of that, I'm able to sort of turn the tide against that. Unless you're able to have those that level of healing, I think it'll always just sort of fester into this more like identity politics game, where each group really needs to reinforce itself through a set of false beliefs to maintain sort of control of its own narrative, over and above the national interest, over and above the continental interest.

Nolita: If the resilience comes from, I guess, the acknowledgement of conflict one's community's role in it or or struggle, is that not the same as identities? Because then I think, does it not then create an environment where it is the Olympics of suffering is I have suffered more than you, or I have suffered at the hands of you, because there are generative parts of like being African that are more positive, that probably could create more positive energy.

Abdullahi: But that's the thing like this. I struggle with Pan African thought is that it stays at the continental level, meaning it stays peripheral, and it doesn't become proximate to like your My specific role in what it means for me to say like I take stock of your, of you, you take stock of me, if, if you are still running in a space where, and I'm talking maybe more about the more pronounced parts of the continent. Maybe I'm talking about Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, DRC, where you've got very entrenched forms of violence that were drawn on these very granular lines. If you stay at the abstract unfortunately, which is sometimes what the Pan African level looks like for these parts of the continent, and negate how it shows up in the immediate you are bound to make the same mistakes

Nolita: You are listening to The Club of Rome podcast, the place to discover bold ideas from change makers tackling the world's biggest challenges, from the climate crisis and inequality to systems change. The podcast is nearly a year old now, and we have an archive of episodes that include an episode on the universal basic dividend, on using music for social change and women silencing the guns. You can find them on Apple Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the discussion.

I want to go back to the discussion about the digital race, or Africa's lack of participation in the technologies that are emerging is, in your opinion, is it? Is it hopeless for us? I mean, the I, when I'm listening to like news from the US, they speak about as if, like, this is the next race to the moon? Are we nonparticipants in the race towards the moon?

Abdullahi: I think there's a privilege, in some ways, in being a last mover, because there are a lot of legacy infrastructure projects that countries have invested hundreds of billions of dollars on across the world that they're still paying debt on that are almost futile at this moment of time. So the fact that we don't have the same legacy systems, I think, could potentially be an advantage, because we have less institutional burden and also less sort of mental burden towards old ways of thinking. Having said that, it means we've got a very narrow window to take advantage of any economic wins that we can over the next few decades, and purpose that towards what's most strategic for us. I don't know that it makes sense to invest massively in being like the number one infrastructure maker of like data centers. I don't know if that's truly strategic, but if we had economic wins from strategic other strategic sectors that have nothing to do with AI, for example, and repurpose that towards building a skills pipeline to service this new kind of industrial wave, that could be a very, very strategic asset for which the different countries can play sort of an interesting geopolitical role as well, and how they engage with with other countries. So, for example, a Middle Eastern country that has large energy supply, if they were to say, “Oh, we will help generate the energy baseload required to help power the data centres that you might need to power your economies. In exchange for that, we will have a skills transfer between either your universities and our talent, or your talent with our companies.” You can actually become competitive in this new configuration of the economy, but I think we've got a relatively small window to be able to do that. I don't think we have to create basically our own ChatGPT, is what I'm saying. I think there's other ways to win the to sort of win as well.

Nolita: I struggle with optimism when it comes to that point, because if those mechanisms to use this technology to our advantage existed, I think even with the social media wave, we would have done more to participate create alternative channels than to essentially just use what is already there, because that's what we started this conversation with. Right that infrastructure exists from elsewhere. There is a lack of investment in moderation and curation and all the things that are necessary to maintain democracies. And as a result, although, like it's often a pretty useful business, like a place to do individual business is not particularly helpful for nation building across these 54 countries. I don't know if that dynamic is going to be overcome when it comes to this particular problem that is even more closed, because at least with social media, you could just, like, make a website and just try to get critical mass of people to participate. This means a type of investment that we have not proven to be capable of doing before.

Abdullahi: Yeah, I get what you mean, but I think it's the economics of it that I'm leaning more into. Like, if we had adequate trade assets, meaning like roads and ports and rails and aviation networks, we would have been able to take full advantage and, of course, internet infrastructure, we'd be able to take the full advantage of what e commerce could have provided for the continent, as far as the transfer and exchange of goods in the online domain. What I'm basically trying to say now is, if we're able to radically industrialise our economies and reduce those bottlenecks that still persist, and by that, there are strong stories, for example, in Côte d'Ivoire. So, the example that I often would cite in workshops is the fact that it literally produces most of the raw cashew nuts in the world, but doesn't gain much in return for that, because much of it is the supply chain is captured in India and Vietnam. Côte d'Ivoire used to just share raw exports. You'd get roasted toasted in South Asia and then sold at a premium to European clients for the most part. Now, I think Côte d'Ivoire now has 20% of the full supply chain since 2008 and I think they started like 5% so just to say that trend is persisting. Now, if you had that where people, where the content is capitalising on its natural assets, on its skills, its strategic proximity, and leveraging that, leveraging the financing wins and headwinds from that, to really re educate its base, because no one has cracked, to be honest, the code when it comes to AI and education. You know, we know that there was a seminal study, actually from Nigeria that the World Bank conducted that said that, you know, students who participated in a 16 week after school program and used AI were able to obtain the same learning outcomes in that 16 weeks that a student typically shows in two years. And it's still one of it's actually now one of the most effective education interventions ever in West Africa. So we are this. There's an advantage in it being a nascent sector, and it being somewhat considered a last mover as well. But this requires a level of coordination, and this requires a level of ambition and imagination that I'm not seeing too much of just yet.

Nolita: The last point I want to make being the type of row is on the climate discussion. Right? The technologies are not climate benign. We have an additional we, being Africa, have an additional risk of being climate vulnerable. Are there any cases that you know of at this stage about like the climate impact that is happening or is potentially going to happen, and any opportunities to overcome it?

Abdullahi: Nothing, nothing definitive. There's speculations, of course, and there are some kind of foresight activities around that, but nothing defined to suggest that there's strong evidence in this, favour or against this definitely by the level of water it requires, and of course, the energy demands of it as well. Does it put a significant strain on Earth Systems, land and water systems, yes, but I think, independent of what the continent does, this trend is going to persist. Unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately. I wonder, truly, I wonder if what it might take for the continent to be a true climate vanguard of the world is for it to become a powerhouse when it comes to energy efficiency, water efficiency and restorative generation, all of which require strong investments towards very technical forms of education. The question then becomes, who's going to finance that? What will it take for us to take full advantage of our strategic assets, of our strategic location, of our strategic skills, which we can definitely nurture? And some where we have strong examples of in Nigeria or Morocco, Egypt with strong tech talent pools, and South Africa as well. If we're able to optimise that even further for more and more parts of the continent, I think we'd be better placed to lead that those kind of efficiency questions as it relates to water, as you were talking about the level of water consumption that these data centers require, the base load energy that requires to power them, efficiency conversations, which perhaps we are more rooted in those environmentally conscious traditions and may be able to translate that once we have more economic might as well. I think at this stage, we're still, in my view, in a very traditional lens of keeping those conversations to more indigenous circles, who, for the most part, lack the level of international power to really shift economic systems.

Nolita: So that brings me to my last question. So, if you could imagine a single transformative action that could revolutionise the fight against disinformation Africa, so if you could do it at the click of a hand, what would it be and why?

Abdullahi: But I need two.

Nolita: You need two clicks?

Abdullahi: Two clicks.

Nolita: I'll make an exception just for you.

Abdullahi: Thank you. Thank you. Nolita, really, I think the obvious one is these safe spaces for courageous conversations. Unfortunately, for those who sort of double down on the power of social media and other scalable technologies. I still think it's largely an offline conversation that needs to happen, and I think it's going to happen at the community level, between groups, between different generations, between different maybe even sometimes organisations or factions. I think that needs to happen in parallel. I. With more economic industrialisation. Because I think sometimes that gives people the headwinds to begin to imagine a future beyond just the past, beyond just the current. You know, when you're able to sort of show headwinds towards a new norm, I think it has a ripple effect, a cascading effect, in as far as saying, what else can we part ways with, and how else can we imagine a new reality for us? So I think it kind of has to be in parallel. It has to be a social and economic effort largely rested on government to be honest.

Nolita: Thank you so much for joining me today, and I guess it really is time to reinvent the future. Thank you for listening to The Club of Rome podcast. Follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, learn more about The Club of Rome at clubofrome.org.

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