If you had walked through the halls of the Egypt International Exhibition Center in February 2026 you would have felt it, a quiet but unmistakable shift in the air. Over 350 AI companies and startups from over 30 countries convened for the inaugural regional edition of AI Everything Middle East & Africa Summit alongside investors controlling a combined portfolio of $50 billion. But it wasn’t the presence of IBM, Microsoft or Cisco that made the moment historic. It was the launch of Karnak, Egypt’s first national large language model, trained on tens of millions of Arabic datasets, and built specifically to appreciate the cultural and language subtleties that Western-trained models often overlook. For the first time, the region was not simply adopting technology built elsewhere. It was building its own.
This is the story of the Afro-Arab digital transformation and at its centre stands a generation that refuses to be a footnote. As the Secretary General recently put it, the economic future of our region will not be built solely on oil and traditional commodities, but increasingly on lines of code, digital platforms, and innovation ecosystems designed and driven by its young people. That is not a slogan. It is a demographic reality. The Afro-Arab region is home to one of the world’s youngest and fastest-growing populations, and young people are already among those best positioned to understand emerging technologies and anticipate where the future is heading.
The evidence is everywhere once you know where to look. In Cairo, the startup Nanovate is developing end-to-end Arabic AI solutions. In Tunisia, Morocco, and Jordan, young founders are building deep-tech companies in AI infrastructure, developer tooling, and security, so promising that five MENA startups were selected for an eight-week Silicon Valley residency through Propeller’s Kernel Camp. In Abu Dhabi, a fintech startup called Mal raised $230 million in what is cited as the largest seed funding round in the Middle East and Africa, building an AI-native Islamic digital bank targeting underbanked communities across the Muslim world. These are not isolated stories. Across the Middle East and North Africa, startups raised $172.6 million across 45 deals in July 2026 alone, with artificial intelligence consistently ranking among the top sectors attracting capital.
What makes this moment different from previous waves of technological enthusiasm is that the infrastructure is finally catching up with the ambition. Mobile technologies and services contributed $240 billion to Africa’s economy in 2025, equivalent to 7.8% of GDP, while supporting approximately 13 million jobs. The continent’s digital economy, currently estimated at around $180 billion, is projected to approach $712 billion by 2050. Egypt has launched its largest-ever digital skills programme, aiming to train 10,000 university students in AI, cybersecurity, and cloud computing, with a broader goal of reaching 800,000 people in ICT training by the end of 2026. Morocco plans to train 100,000 young people annually in digital skills and generate 240,000 jobs in the sector by 2030.
But amid all the momentum, an uncomfortable truth remains. Over 500 million Africans have no verifiable digital identity, and more than 80 percent of workers remain in the informal economy. Access to finance continues to be a constraint on entrepreneurship. Rapid technological change requires new skills that traditional institutions are often slow to supply. The digital divide between big cities and rural communities leaves out talented young people who do not have access to connectivity, electricity and devices. And in Egypt, where youth unemployment is 18.7 percent, hiring into AI-exposed professions for 22 to 25 year olds has quietly fallen 14 percent globally since the launch of ChatGPT. The potential is enormous but the risk of a generation brimming with talent being left behind is also.
This is precisely where the Afro-Arab Youth Council’s mandate becomes not just relevant but urgent. We have long insisted that young people must move beyond symbolic participation and become genuine architects of development. That means shifting from viewing youth as passive consumers of digital tools to deliberately placing them at the centre of digital governance and decision-making. It means re-engineering education systems that still prioritise memorisation over hands-on problem-solving in AI, software development, and data analytics. And it means recognising that digitalisation is not simply about purchasing computers or creating websites, it is about redesigning business models, public services, and institutions through technology.
The good news is that the tools for this transformation are increasingly within reach. The UNDP’s new Africa Accelerator for Digital Public Infrastructure, launched in June 2026, is designed to help countries move from fragmented digital initiatives to connected systems that deliver impact at scale. The African Continental Free Trade Area presents an estimated $450 billion opportunity that stronger digital infrastructure can help unlock. And across the region, young entrepreneurs are already building businesses online, developing digital solutions, and accessing global markets regardless of national borders.
But infrastructure and funding alone will not be enough. The Council has consistently argued that empowering young technology leaders requires structural reforms rather than tokenistic youth forums. It requires governments, educational institutions, and the private sector to collaborate around three pillars i.e education that reflects the modern labour market, digital inclusion that reaches rural and marginalised communities, and genuine authority for young people in the rooms where decisions are made.
The story of Karnak is instructive. Named after the ancient temple in Luxor as a symbol of Egypt’s civilization, the model was explicitly designed as foundational infrastructure upon which startups and private companies can build AI applications tailored for local and regional markets. That is the mindset we need, not just consuming the future, but constructing it. The Afro-Arab youth are ready. The question is whether the institutions that surround them, governments, corporates, and yes, even youth councils like ours will match their ambition with the access, resources, and trust they deserve.
The author works with the Afro-Arab Youth Council (AAYC)
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