Why Uganda should draw lessons from UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan

The government needs to come up with Uganda’s AI Action Plan, tailored to the local context

COMMENT | KENEDY MUSEKURA | Ever since the launch of artificial intelligence (AI) in 2022, apart from the fact that a day on earth still has 24 hours; a week still has seven days, and there are still twelve months in a year, our world has literally not remained the same. AI is upending our world at an extraordinary pace. Many governments that had well laid out elaborate plans for their countries have had to swiftly adjust to the wave of AI by establishing AI Action plans.

I wish to draw reflections from the United Kingdom (UK). In January 2025, the UK’s Department for Science and Technology (DST) came up with an AI Opportunities Action Plan (AOAP). Uganda’s UK equivalent is the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

The UK’s AOAP is comprehensive. It has three chapters and a conclusion. I will highlight what caught my eye mostly.

First is the foreword by Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology.  Kyle challenges his government to invest in the foundations of AI. He envisions the UK being at the centre of world-class computing and data infrastructure, access to talent and regulations.

He goes on to look forward to a UK that pushes hard on cross-economy AI adoption; that is, the public sector should rapidly pilot and scale AI products and services as well as encourage the private sector to do the same with the aim of driving better experiences and outcomes for the citizens and boosting productivity.

The first chapter, themed “Lay the Foundations to Enable AI”, appeals to the government to set out, within six months, a long-term plan for the UK’s AI infrastructure needs, backed by a 10-year investment commitment, through building a world-class AI compute ecosystem with a clear objective and long-term capability and expertise.

It calls for the establishment of ‘AI Growth Zones’ (AIGZs) to facilitate the accelerated build-out of AI data centres, build public sector data collection infrastructure and finance the creation of new high-value data sets that meet the public sector, academia and startup needs. It calls for the active incentivization and reward of researchers and industry to curate and unlock private data sets. On the latter, by way of juxtaposition, the Uganda Communication Commission (UCC), incentivizes sectors like film industry, but it is high time UCC brought on board researchers and innovators of AI products too.

The AOAP goes on to envision a copyright-cleared British media asset training dataset which can be licensed internationally at scale through partnering with bodies that hold valuable cultural data like the National Archive, Natural History Museum, British Library and the BBC to develop a commercial position for sharing their data to advance AI.

The equivalent of UK’s examples for AI ‘mining’ are platforms such as universities; newspapers like The New Vision, The Daily Monitor, The Independent and The Observer and the Uganda Museum.  These places are housing a lot of data that can be exploited to train AI models in a Ugandan context including local languages, by relying on papers like: Bukkedde  of Vision Group and defunct Vision Group papers like: Orumuri, Etop and Rupiny and Enyandda for Monitor Publication.

I acknowledge the presence ofa  National Development Plan IV 2025/26-2029/30 currently acting as the campus for all sectors of the government of Uganda and private sector up to 2030. Indeed, it has a whole chapter nine devoted to technology. However, by the time NDPIV came out, AI was in its nascent stages, and it was not specifically addressed in NDPIV.

A critical look at NDPIV gives the impression that it was crafted bearing in mind the internet era only. Unfortunately, technology has significantly shifted to the AI revolution to the extent that internet players at the global arena such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc., are themselves playing catch-up with AI’s new kids on the block; thanks to their models like OpenAI’s ChartGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, DeepSeek etc.

Therefore, stakeholders like the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation; the National Council for Science and Technology; UCC; the National Planning Authority; the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, etc., should draw a lesson or two from the UK’s AI plan and urgently come up with Uganda’s AI Action Plan, tailored to the Ugandan context.

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Kenedy Musekura is a lawyer, Digital & Policy Analyst

  musekurakenedy@gmail.com 

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