By Raylenne Kambua |
More than 150 million persons with disabilities across Africa navigate a digital landscape not designed for them, with inaccessible websites, unusable mobile applications, unreachable government services, and educational platforms that often lock them out. This exclusion carries a direct economic cost, which the World Bank estimates at 3–7% of countries’ Gross Domestic Product.
Increasingly, connectivity for persons with disabilities has become less a question of infrastructure coverage and more about accessibility and meaningful usage. While internet services are available to 85% of Africa’s population, 64% of those within coverage do not use them, with persons with disabilities among the most excluded groups. The exclusion has been reinforced by the high costs of devices, with some markets taxing entry-level smartphones up to 50%, making them unaffordable for low-income households.
Figures from the Assistive Technology Landscape in Africa Report show that only one in ten people who need assistive technologies across the continent have access to them, while 85% of mobility devices are still imported. This is a reflection of weak local production systems and heavy reliance on external supply chains.
At the seventh Inclusive Africa Conference, convened by inABLE in Nairobi from June 2–4, 2026, conversations examined whether Africa’s fast-expanding digital economy works for everyone or reproduces recurring forms of exclusion.
As Irene Mbari-Kirika, Executive Director of inABLE, noted, many technologies continue to fail because they are not developed with persons with disabilities in mind. This means that such devices can not be used by millions of potential users, and it has direct consequences for several users’ financial autonomy, privacy, and safety, especially in digital financial services such as mobile money.
Africa’s challenge is therefore not only access to assistive technologies, but the absence of a coherent local ecosystem for their design, production, distribution, and implementation. Building a sustainable assistive technologies value chain grounded in local materials, regional manufacturing, and culturally and linguistically relevant design is increasingly central to closing this gap.
The structural barriers to inclusion are deeply embedded across sectors, including in the education sector, where teacher training often excludes digital accessibility, curricula are rarely tested with assistive technologies, and assessment methods continue to assume uniform modes of learning and expression. These gaps, including digital literacy gaps, are compounded by the limited availability of African-language datasets, particularly for learners with communication disabilities, which constrains the development of inclusive digital and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled learning tools.
Notably, AI presents both opportunity and risk for digital inclusion. The outcome depends on whether inclusion is embedded in design, data, and deployment. On the upside, AI-enabled tools have expanded access for blind and low-vision users, while applications in healthcare are widening access to psychosocial support on a continent with less than two mental health professionals per 100,000 people. Real-time sign language translation and voice-to-text tools are also creating new pathways for participation.
At the same time, without targeted upskilling and bias audits, AI risks simultaneously opening one door for persons with disabilities while closing others. For example, AI systems are automating roles such as data entry, transcription, and customer service, which have historically provided key employment pathways for persons with disabilities. Yet, AI models trained on biased or unrepresentative datasets and automated decision-making processes risk excluding persons with disabilities from recruitment systems.
Mercy Ndegwa, Director of Public Policy for Africa at Meta, stressed this point, noting that AI systems can only reflect communities whose data and voices are included in their design and training. This makes the inclusion of organisations of persons with disabilities in AI governance not only a rights imperative but also a technical requirement for building functional systems.
However, African-language datasets remain severely underdeveloped, and the cost of building them at scale is prohibitive for most actors.
The launch at the summit of the development of Africa’s first Harmonised Digital Accessibility Standard for ICT Products and Services marks an important step toward continent-wide alignment. The 24-month participatory process targets adoption across all 45 African Organisation for Standardisation (ARSO) member countries. The regional standard will be adapted to African languages, culture, and infrastructural realities, changing the procurement baseline for governments while setting a compliance reference for private technology developers across the continent. Fourteen countries have reportedly confirmed participation.
Throughout the discussions, the principle “Nothing about us without us” remained central, with an acknowledgement that persons with disabilities are contributors, decision-makers, and leaders in designing systems that affect them, and not merely end-users or research subjects to be consulted only after decisions are made. Design consultant Rama Gheerawo framed this through three registers: designing for, designing by, and designing with persons with disabilities as co-creators throughout all processes.
CIPESA has been emphatic that governments, regulators, and telecommunication operators bear the greatest responsibility for digital inclusion for persons with disabilities. Civil society efforts cannot substitute for enforceable action and measurable implementation. Limited capacity to engage in technical standard-setting also continues to hinder progress on digital rights for persons with disabilities. At the same time, fragmented approaches and shifting donor priorities are placing increasing strain on the sustainability of this work.
The European Union (EU) AI Act sets a benchmark for how regulation can protect marginalised groups, while the African Union (AU) Continental AI Strategy provides guiding principles on how AI should be developed, governed, and used across the continent. However, no African has developed definitive AI legislation, although several are developing policies or strategies. As CIPESA has emphasised, AI policy frameworks across Africa must include persons with disabilities from the outset.
More specifically, efforts must be geared toward fixing AI at the source by including representatives of persons with disabilities in training data, ensuring algorithmic accountability, and making AI-powered public services accessible to all. Moreover, all AI regulations and policies must have explicit disability provisions.
Additionally, governments must reduce sector-specific taxes on entry-level assistive devices and assistive technology hardware, and mandate that Universal Service Access Fund disbursements include explicit, measurable targets for connectivity for persons with disabilities.