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TED Talks Daily is sponsored by Capital One. In my house we subscribe to everything. Music, tv, even dog food. And it rocks. Until you have to manage it all. Which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost. With one sign in, you can manage all your subscriptions all in one place. Learn more at Capital1.comsubscriptions Terms and Conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Ambetter Health Group Health insurance can put businesses in a tough position if you're a business owner, a CFO or an HR leader, this is probably going to sound familiar. It's fall and you find out your group health insurance premium will be more expensive next year, maybe by a lot. And as usual, you have to pick one carrier and a few plans for all of the employees. But they each have different medical needs, different budgets and different preferences for doctors. Plus, the carrier's network might not be strong where all employees live. Fortunately, there's a new approach. It's called an Ichra or Ichra and it's a game changer. ICHRAs make costs predictable with stable pre tax contributions and a larger risk pool. And they make health plans personal because employees can buy any plan that fits their needs from any carrier. You choose how much to contribute. They choose what works for them. It's about time, right? For coverage you control, plan on and Ichra. Learn more@ambetterhealth.com Ichra this episode is sponsored by Framer still jumping between tools to update your website? Framer unifies design, CMS and publishing on one canvas. No handoff, no hassle. Everything you need to design and publish in one place. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites and it's now redefining how we design for the web with the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas based design tool. Framer is more than a site builder. It's a true all in one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site. Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. Think unlimited projects, unlimited pages, unlimited collaborators and all the essentials. Vectors, 3D transforms, gradients, wireframes, everything you need to design. Totally free. Ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool. Start creating for free@framer.com design and use code Ted for a free month of framer pro. That's framer.com design promo code TED framer.com design promo code Ted rules and restrictions May apply. You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. One question being asked across the world right now is, will AI take my job? It's a valid question and fear. But can you imagine a world where AI actually helps increase opportunities? In his talk, Hardy Pemiwa, whose company is helping to bring broadband Internet to all of Africa, tells us why developing AI AI infrastructure in Africa will help to multiply and amplify human capacity on the continent. He says the right question to ask is, when will the world catch up to what Africa is doing with AI.
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I've been meeting a lot of people of late who asked me this question, when will Africa catch up to the AI revolution? And I look at them with a lot of humility and I say to them, you're asking the wrong question. And of course, a lot of them look at me with surprise. I say, here is the right question. When will the world catch up to what Africa is doing with AI? But before I dive into AI You've heard a lot about AI Let me take you on a geography lesson. Africa is big. It's 54 countries, 1.6 billion people, and Africa is young. I'm one of the older ones, and I consider myself young. These are digital natives, incredible digital skills. But it wasn't always like this. Thirty years ago, there were more telephone lines in New York City than the whole of sub Saharan Africa. But that was 30 years ago. In 30 years, here is what has happened. We now have a billion mobile phone connections. We now have 1.1 billion mobile money accounts. That's up from only 300 million 10 years ago. It's driving financial inclusion at an unprecedented scale today. If I needed to pay my barber, the fruit vendor on the side of the road, my utility bill, my mechanic, it's easy, it's accessible, it's convenient, and it's cheap. I use my mobile money account. Whether it's Eco Cash or M Pesa, it's one of those two. But Africa's demographic dividend is also one of its biggest challenges. I know a lot of people think of Africa and they think of poverty and disease and wars, but this is not our biggest problem. Our biggest challenge is youth unemployment. And I think it's one challenge that AI is uniquely placed to solve. And Africa has been able to embrace technology at an unprecedented scale. So now that we've been through geography, let me take you into the future. Please meet Yemura. Yemura is 24. She's a high school graduate born in Zimbabwe and raised in Zimbabwe, like me, like millions of her peers, she's tech savvy. She can type faster than any of you. She knows all the shortcuts on WhatsApp. But up until now, her future would have been bleak. She would have been as unemployed as any of her peers, but for the fact that she has just graduated from one of the AI academies that we have on the continent. Early morning, Yamurae is teaching math using AI to over 200 students across five schools. These schools have got free Internet. By midday, Yemurai has joined the local nurse at a health clinic that is not too far away from where she lives, helping with diagnosis. Malaria, tb, belhasia. That's a disease, by the way. And by the evening, some of her neighbors are coming to see MRI with soil samples and with diseased plants that she takes photos of. And she's able to tell them what fertilizer, what seeds, what's happening to their maize. Crop yields are now up 40% where she lives. But Yemura is not a teacher. She's not a nurse, she's not an agronomist. What is she? She's what we call an AI amplified community entrepreneur. She's paid for each of these services that I described through her mobile money account, and she's earning three times more than the peers in her local area and even those that are in the urban areas. She's solving the problem of the shortage of teachers that is so pervasive across most of Africa. This is how we're going to solve the problem of a shortage of doctors that is so pervasive across most of Africa. And in many of the rural areas of Africa where there's so much arable land, there is such a shortage of agronomists. And now Yamurai, powered with a smartphone and an AI assistant, is able to solve these problems. Now, I'm looking at you and you're asking yourselves, how is this even possible? I'm glad you asked. My name is Hadi Pemiwa. I am the CEO of Cassava Technologies. We are the company that has literally connected Africa. We are connecting more than 300 towns and cities across Africa with fiber broadband, bringing Internet to more than 500 million people across the continent. And we have now added a platform of interconnected data centers that are AI ready. And this is where AI meets the infrastructure that Cassava has been building. Our plan now is to build Africa's first AI factory using local data algorithms, local compute capacity to produce local intelligence. We're Building an AI ecosystem for those that were previously excluded. Because we understand that without AI infrastructure, Africa is going to fall further behind. Our AI factory is about bringing breakthroughs, it's about bringing job creation. It's about powering Yemurae's dream of being a doctor, an agronomist and a teacher. Powered with mobile broadband, mobile money, fiber broadband, and now GPUs that we've been able to get from Nvidia. We are bringing to life AI infrastructure for Africa to compete with everybody else in this AI age. This is Africa's AI revolution. It's not about substitution, it's about multiplication. We want to amplify human capacity and we want to eliminate impossibility by bringing AI to those that the world had previously excluded. So what is our AI factory going to do? Already we're powering more than 12,000 AI developers, more than 1,100 startups across Southern Africa, East Africa, West Africa and North Africa. 285 universities are going to be using our AI factory. And because we've already been working with enterprises for the first 30 years, 67,000 organizations of Africa's largest enterprises, from banks to telcos to state owned enterprises, are all embracing this vision of an AI powered future for the continent. On a continent where the median age is only 19. This is not just an improvement of digital infrastructure, this is a revolution that we are bringing to Africa. Because the next 1 billion users of AI are not going to use AI the same way that the first 1 billion have been using it. They're coming from places where a single AI amplified human must do the work of tech. They're building AI to not only diagnose diseases that some of us have never heard of, but to teach math and physics and chemistry. In Swahili, in the belle, in Zulu, in Shona, you name it. They're building AI in order to detect counterfeit medicines. Africa has a big problem with counterfeit medicines. They're building AI to diagnose grops. They're building AI to amplify human possibility. Because in Africa, constraints have always driven innovation. That's why pay as you go came from Africa. That's why mobile money came from Africa, because we didn't have bank accounts to protect. And that's why AI models that are trained on African realities are more robust, more efficient and more inclusive. So I'm going to go back to my initial question that I've been asked by so many, including some that I've met during this conference. When will Africa catch up to the AI revolution? I'm sure you agree with me that whilst we sit here in this conference talking about AI ethics in Africa, we are deploying AI to serve the many and not the few. We are optimizing AI for impact and not for social media clicks. 30 years ago, the experts on Africa said It would take 50 years for Africa to have the kind of mobile telephony that we have. And they estimated that it would require $50 billion to do it. Well, I have news for you. 70% of the mobile money transactions that are going to happen in the world today are going to happen on African soil. And guess what? Africa is ready to do it again. We want to make AI inclusive, accessible, relevant and affordable. Because the future of AI is not just going to be written in Silicon Valley. The future of AI is going to be written in the Silicon Savannah in Kenya, is going to be written on the streets of Lagos. It's going to be written in thousands of villages that some of us have never heard of. There are millions of Yamurais out there that are writing the future of AI, solving problems that we didn't even know existed. Building a future where AI amplifies human potential instead of replacing it. In London, they are worrying about whether teachers are going to lose their jobs because of AI. In Africa, we're embracing AI to solve the shortage of teachers. In New York, they're building AI algorithms in order to trade stocks faster. For us, it's about AI that can increase crop yields and reduce mortality amongst five year olds. That's the future of AI. So this is not just Africa's AI moments. This is AI Africa Moments. Are you coming?
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That was Hardy Pemiwa speaking at TED AI in Vienna, Austria in 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more@ted.com curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balarazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feedback. Thanks for listening. TED Talks Daily is sponsored by Capital One. In my house, we subscribe to everything. Music, tv, even dog food. And it rocks until you have to manage it all, which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost. With one sign in, you can manage all your subscriptions all in one place. Learn more at CapitalOne.comscriptions Terms and Conditions apply.
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This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love, it helps schedule a test drive, get pre approved for financing and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.
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