Lacina Kone, Director General and CEO of Smart Africa.
Smart Africa digital The Academy and tech firm Realtime have launched a partnership to establish a national security framework across Africa's digital landscape.
The collaboration seeks to counter AI-powered foreign surveillance and cyber threats, as African nations currently face 60% more cyber attacks than the global average.
The alliance focuses on moving beyond doctrinal policy to strategic defense to ensure that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) does not compromise national security. The partnership states that the 2026 rollout focuses on three pillars aimed at digital decolonization.
The initiative serves as a defensive measure against foreign laws such as the US Cloud Act, which allows external jurisdictions to subpoena data stored on international servers.
These pillars include full data sovereignty through state-controlled communications enclaves to keep sensitive intelligence information within national borders.
It also includes strategic AI governance to protect against deepfake-driven disinformation and post-quantum resilience to protect state secrets.
Smart Africa is no longer equitable digitization But they are actively defending, says Lasina Kone, director general and CEO of Smart Africa.
He says the partnership equips member countries with the strategic tools to run infrastructure on their own terms.
François Rodriguez, Realtime's chief commercial officer, says sovereignty should be built through local flexibility rather than bought.
While competitors such as Microsoft and Amazon have increased their African data center footprint, the firm says the Realtime Sovereign Enclave model offers a level of state autonomy that traditional commercial clouds cannot match.
By partnering with Realtime, a specialist in zero-trust architecture, Smart Africa says it is pitting itself against the dominance of Silicon Valley and Chinese tech giants.