In early February, I attended the Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi — as a researcher working on global security and emerging technologies, not as someone who usually moves in tech circles. I came with a hypothesis: that the most consequential conversations about Africa's future are increasingly happening at the intersection of technology, governance, and security, further away from the traditional spaces of diplomacy and academic debate. A week in Nairobi was enough to confirm it.

The Summit brought together a remarkable range of actors — policymakers, entrepreneurs, development practitioners, and researchers — united by a shared conviction that technology is not merely a sector but a geopolitical question. Several sessions stood out.

"AI in Africa: Hype, Reality, and What Comes Next" offered a necessary corrective to the dominant narrative. Beyond the buzzwords, the discussion pressed on what artificial intelligence can concretely deliver on the continent today — and where the gap between promise and infrastructure remains vast. "Why Africa Needs Decentralized AI" pushed this further, making a compelling case for building AI as a public good rather than a product, with digital sovereignty as the organising principle. For scholars of governance, this framing is significant: it recenters the question of who controls the architecture of emerging technologies, and to whose benefit.

The session that resonated most deeply with my own research was "Technology's Role in Realising a Peaceful Continent." The discussion went straight to the structural questions: who owns the data that shapes peace technology? Whose realities are encoded into the systems being built? The observation that war technology attracts capital at scale while peace technology struggles for funding is not merely a market failure, it is a political statement about where global priorities lie.

I also attended the Cardano Africa Tech Summit, where the case for blockchain's relevance beyond cryptocurrency was made through concrete evidence: a recent United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report documenting over 40 real-world pilots where blockchain supports transparent payments, digital identity, and climate finance across the continent. The session on intra-African trade made the stakes concrete — the payment infrastructure being built today is not a technical footnote but a political one, determining whether continental integration frameworks like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) translate from ambition into practice. As Kenyan Secretary of ICT Mary Kerema put it: "We do not want to simply be a market. We want to be a maker."

That line stayed with me as a concise expression of what the entire week was really about. The Summit was a reminder that disciplinary boundaries are increasingly inadequate for understanding the forces reshaping the continent. Security researchers, IR scholars, and governance specialists cannot afford to leave these conversations to technologists alone.