As digital systems expand across Africa, from mobile banking to national ID schemes, so do the risks. Inconsistent infrastructure and fragmented regulatory approaches have left some sectors exposed. Meanwhile, algorithmic bias threatens to exclude African users or misrepresent them, prompting experts to call for stronger local investment in AI education and governance.
Speaking to Global South Pole in a thought-provoking conversation, Dr. Abdoul-Aziz Maiga, an AI for cybersecurity researcher at the Pan-African University of Science and Technology in Kenya, said freely available AI tools are being used to bypass traditional verification systems. These tools, he warns, allow attackers to scale fraud at a level never seen before.
“Generative AI tools can now create highly convincing fake IDs like images, facial [recognition], biometrics, and voice clone. So it makes it much more harder for traditional security checks to detect fraud. So this threatens not only [the] financial sector, but also critical areas like [the] military, healthcare, voting, and social welfare distributions,” Dr. Maiga said.
To listen to the whole conversation with the AI expert, tune in to the Global South Pole podcast, brought to you by Sputnik Africa.
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