The Smart Africa digital Academy and tech firm RealTyme have launched a partnership to establish a national protection framework across Africa’s digital landscape.
The collaboration seeks to counter AI-driven foreign surveillance and cyber threats, as African nations currently face a 60% higher rate of cyber-attacks than the global average.
The alliance focuses on moving beyond theoretical policy toward tactical defence to ensure adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) does not compromise national security. The 2026 rollout centres on three pillars aimed at digital decolonisation, says the partnership.
The initiative acts as a defensive counter-measure to foreign laws, such as the US Cloud Act, which allows external jurisdictions to subpoena data stored on international servers.
These pillars include absolute data sovereignty through state-controlled communication enclaves to keep sensitive intelligence within national borders.
It also includes tactical AI governance to protect against deepfake-driven disinformation and post-quantum resilience to safeguard state secrets.
Smart Africa is no longer just digitising but actively defending, says Lacina Koné, Director General and CEO of Smart Africa.
The partnership equips member states with tactical tools to run infrastructure on their own terms, he says.
Sovereignty must be built through local resilience rather than purchased, says François Rodriguez, chief commercial officer of RealTyme.
While competitors like Microsoft and Amazon have increased their African data centre footprint, the RealTyme sovereign enclave model offers a level of state autonomy that traditional commercial clouds cannot match, says the firm.
By partnering with RealTyme, a specialist in zero-trust architecture, Smart Africa says it is positioning itself against the dominance of Silicon Valley and Chinese tech giants.
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