Vice President Kashim Shettima has said Africa must take a more prominent role in shaping global technology policy, arguing that the continent has for too long been underrepresented in decisions that define the future of digital technology.

Speaking at the African Telecommunications Union’s Conference of Plenipotentiaries in Abuja, Shettima, represented by Deputy Chief of Staff Ibrahim Hadejia, said Nigeria remains committed to ensuring Africa actively shapes global digital decisions rather than merely participating in them. Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy Bosun Tijani said Nigeria’s N ATLAS platform for local languages has been incorporated into a new continental initiative called ATLAS OMOJA, developed in partnership with the Global System for Mobile Communications Association, aimed at building African languages and knowledge systems into artificial intelligence tools shaping the continent’s future, with Nigeria, Kenya, Namibia and Togo as founding members.

African Telecommunications Union Secretary General John Omo described the conference as a pivotal moment for the continent’s digital future, while separately disclosing that the union and the mobile association are working to strengthen the roughly 240 billion dollar contribution the telecom sector makes to the African economy, urging regulators to use industry data more actively in shaping policy.

Mobile association policy officials at a related workshop called for modernizing outdated, technology specific licensing regimes to accommodate emerging services like satellite communications, and urged governments to remove taxes on entry level smartphones to improve affordability, noting that about 961 million Africans live within mobile broadband coverage but do not use the service due to cost, creating what the association calls a usage gap that risks excluding millions from the benefits of digital transformation.