South Africa’s G20 opportunity in the age of AI

South Africa's G20 opportunity in the age of AI

19 September 2025 - Rennie Naidoo

As G20 president, South Africa can highlight the importance of digital sovereignty for ensuring dignity, economic justice, and resilience.

South Africa presides over the G20 at a global inflection point where artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming economies, altering labour markets and reconfiguring global influence at unprecedented speed. Yet the benefits of this revolution are not being shared equitably. For much of the Global South, especially Africa, AI remains something imported, not shaped, governed or owned.

This presidency offers a singular opportunity to shift that dynamic by placing inclusive digital sovereignty at the heart of the G20 agenda. Without bold, coordinated policy action, developing nations risk deepening their digital dependency, missing out on economic gains and being excluded from shaping the rules of tomorrow's AI-driven world.

What is digital sovereignty?

Digital sovereignty is the ability of a nation to build, govern and protect its digital infrastructure and AI systems in alignment with its social values, economic needs and constitutional rights. It is not about isolation; it's about autonomy. Without it, countries become passive users of external technologies, subject to decisions made in foreign boardrooms and labs with little input from the Global South.

Left unchallenged, this digital dependency risks becoming a new form of colonisation - one where power is exercised not through land or labour, but through code, data and invisible infrastructures.

For African economies, the stakes are especially high. While AI systems promise breakthroughs in health, education and climate resilience, they also risk deepening digital dependency, enabling unchecked surveillance and accelerating job displacement - unless governed with foresight and fairness. Fairness, as articulated in global digital governance frameworks, includes equitable access to digital technologies, non-discrimination in AI outcomes, respect for human rights and meaningful inclusion of developing countries in shaping the rules of the global digital economy. The UN's proposed Global Digital Compact (GDC) reinforces the need for inclusive digital governance. It affirms the importance of a rights-based, people-centred digital order that ensures equitable access, protects human dignity and includes the Global South in norm-setting processes. As outlined in the compact, core principles such as inclusivity, interoperability, sustainability and respect for human rights are essential guardrails for building a just and equitable digital future.

Why the G20 must act

AI leadership remains concentrated in two global powers - China and the US - that dominate foundational models, patents, cloud infrastructure and data flows. They control most patents, foundational models, data infrastructure and cloud resources. Left unchecked, this concentration of power risks excluding Global South countries from setting digital norms and defining their own futures. Emerging agentic AI models - systems capable of autonomous decision-making - pose even deeper governance dilemmas, blurring accountability and amplifying the urgency of inclusive oversight. These systems may independently initiate actions, making it harder to trace responsibility, ensure safety or enforce local laws, particularly in regions where regulatory capacity is still evolving. The risk of marginalisation in AI governance for developing nations remains high unless representation and coordination mechanisms are strengthened through global compacts. Moreover, as highlighted by UNCTAD, developing countries face the risk of becoming mere providers of key raw materials and raw data with little influence over how digital technologies are governed, monetised or standardised.

Africa's limited voice in global norm-setting forums means we are often bound by rules we didn't write and systems we don't own. The consequences are real: increased surveillance risks, job displacement without support and a growing gap between tech innovation and ethical accountability.

We also need to confront a dangerous assumption embedded in the G20 narrative: that Africa's primary contribution to the global digital economy lies in its critical minerals. These resources are indeed essential for green and digital technologies, yet real power lies not in extraction but in value creation. South Africa should use its G20 platform to connect the mineral agenda to a broader strategy for digital industrialisation: from semiconductors to intelligent devices, from robotics to AI systems - built and governed in Africa.

This necessitates supportive global frameworks that uphold the digital sovereignty of developing countries through equitable data governance, open standards and technology transfer on mutually agreed terms. The GDC advocates for inclusive, interoperable and rights-based data governance, emphasising the need to bridge all digital divides and bolster local innovation capacity, particularly in the Global South. Similarly, debates at the World Trade Organization (WTO) on data localisation highlight growing tensions between cross-border data flows and the right of countries to define domestic rules for data privacy, development and national security, tensions that disproportionately affect developing economies with fragile digital infrastructures and limited negotiating power.

At the same time, South Africa must engage with the evolving WTO Joint Initiative on E-Commerce, particularly debates around cross-border data flows and data localisation rules, where many developing nations have expressed concern that unrestricted data transfers could erode digital sovereignty and undermine local industries. Without reform, these global rules risk constraining Africa's ability to retain digital value, build local cloud capacity and establish governance standards suited to its developmental context.

South Africa's G20 presidency offers a once-in-a-generation chance to correct course. We must champion digital sovereignty as a foundation for equitable, sustainable development and embed it into the very structure of global AI governance. The G20, under South Africa's leadership, must shift the conversation from digital consumption to digital capability, from being mere users of AI to being shapers of its digital future.

A roadmap to embed AI digital sovereignty

To translate these ambitions into tangible impact, South Africa's G20 presidency must rally support for a bold, inclusive digital transformation agenda anchored in six strategic pillars:

• Balance innovation with AI safety and ethics: Innovation should not come at the expense of ethics or human rights. South Africa should push for AI policies that treat safety and societal impact with the same urgency as patents and performance metrics.
• Invest in equitable AI infrastructure: We need investments in digital commons - open datasets, affordable computing power and AI models trained in African languages and contexts. Equitable access to infrastructure can enable local innovation and reduce dependency on foreign platforms.
• Empower the public sector and universities: AI leadership must go beyond big tech. Governments, universities and public innovation hubs must be treated as primary architects, not passive recipients, of AI systems. Their involvement ensures broader public accountability and long-term societal value.
• Prevent abuse by private and state actors: Accountability is non-negotiable. Whether in the hands of corporations or governments, AI systems must be subject to transparent, independent oversight to prevent abuse, exclusion and concentration of power.
• Secure a just labour transition: Automation threatens to displace jobs, especially in low- and middle-income economies. The G20 must commit to AI transition justice - reskilling programmes, safety nets and innovation strategies that create jobs in human-centric sectors like care, education and green energy.
• Reform global AI governance: AI is inherently global, but current governance structures are skewed. South Africa should advocate for reform in digital governance forums to ensure that developing economies have an equal voice in shaping global AI norms and standards.

A call for shared digital sovereignty

Digital sovereignty is not a luxury; it is a prerequisite for digital dignity, economic justice and long-term resilience. The G20 presidency gives South Africa a unique platform to assert that sovereignty must extend into the digital realm, and that every nation has the right to shape its own technological future.

This moment calls for structural change, not symbolic gestures. We must reimagine leadership in the digital age, not as the accumulation of power but as the distribution of possibility.

That is what South Africa can offer the world: not just a G20 presidency, but a blueprint for shared digital sovereignty, where AI empowers all, not just the powerful, and where no society is left behind.

Rennie Naidoo is Research Director and Professor of Information Systems in the School of Business Sciences at Wits University. This article was first published on https://t20southafrica.org/