One third of humanity has never sent an email, loaded a webpage, or accessed a digital service. Behind that statistic lies a geography of exclusion that is neither accidental nor inevitable. In fact, it is the predictable outcome of technologies designed for markets that rural communities in the Global South were never part of. The digital divide has kept these communities at the periphery of the information age. The AI divide threatens to make that periphery permanent.
Unlike the digital divide, which could in principle be closed by “extending infrastructure”, the AI divide compounds itself. It feeds on data! Consequently, the communities least connected are the least represented in the datasets that train the models now reshaping education, agriculture, healthcare, and governance. Absence from the internet becomes absence from AI, which becomes absence from the decisions AI is increasingly being trusted to make. For rural areas across Sub-Saharan Africa and the broader Global South, this is not a future risk. It is a present reality.
This lecture draws on works at the intersection of these two divides. It presents concrete efforts to build community-owned networks in Africa; to design agricultural and educational AI tools that begin from what rural users actually have, not from what urban designers assume; to develop technologies for communities whose mother tongues have no meaningful presence in existing AI systems. The goal is not only to share research. It is to make the urgency of these questions impossible to ignore; and to invite the audience into a reflection: What if the margin is not the afterwork but the starting point from which responsible technology becomes possible?
About the speaker
Jean Louis Fendji is an Associate Professor at the University of Ngaoundéré, where he heads the Centre for Research, Experimentation and Production at the School of Chemical Engineering and Mineral Industries. He holds a Dr.-Ing. in Computer Science from the University of Bremen, Germany.
His research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and ICT for development, with a focus on leveraging AI and optimisation techniques to address sustainable development goals in rural areas. Over fifteen years, his work has spanned wireless mesh network design, automatic speech recognition for low-resource African languages, AI governance frameworks, and the study of generative AI bias and its consequences for unconnected communities. He has authored over 45 peer-reviewed works and has been involved in numerous projects funded by the Global Partnership on AI, the European Union, German Cooperation (GIZ), Internet Society, and Association for Progressive Communication, working across numerous countries in Africa.
He is a STIAS Iso Lomso Fellow (2024-2026) and a Fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study (2025). He is member of the AI and ICT Commission at the Ministry of Scientific Research and Innovation in Cameroon, and Co-Principal Investigator of the EU Horizon DIGITAfrica project.
