New partnership set to shift Uganda’s AI readiness

Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) firm, Arxia and Uganda’s AI capacity building entity, Vision Africa AI are now in a partnership to better AI adoption across different sectors.

While transitioning from chatbot answers into agentic AI, the initial focus has been set on the academia, including universities and other higher education institutions, with extra intent to build usage capacity among fintechs, financial market entities like banks, plus schools, and health facilities.

Following the memorandum of understanding, signed by the two entities at the end of last month, Arxia, will implement its catalogue of AI tools like Adversio, while Vision Africa AI will undertake capacity building and the subsequent certification. The development comes at a time when Sub-Saharan Africa ranks lowest in the government AI readiness index.

Overview

The 2025 Government AI Readiness Index Report published by Oxford Insights ranks Sub-Saharan Africa last out of the nine assessed regions including North America which ranks first with an 81.51 score, Europe, Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean among others.

The ranking factors in aspects like policy capacity, public adoption, development and technology diffusion (how AI is being used in a country), resilience, AI infrastructure and governance.

From the report, Uganda ranks fifteenth in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a 35.8 score, still below the 42.5 world average, but above the 29.1 regional average. It sits below South Africa, which ranks first, Mauritius, second, Kenya, third, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania and other countries.

According to Carlos Parker, the business director at Arxia, the reason why organizations are struggling to implement AI isn’t because of the technology, but technical difficulties.

“Organizations lack the frameworks and the operational capacity to actually implement. We're going to solve this and implement AI only when we are actually able to integrate this technology into the company workflows and operations in an efficient manner,” said Parker.

He also notes that global implementation of agentic AI, capable of executing tasks like auto emailing, drafting reports and presentations, and repurposing knowledge, plus other sophisticated tasks stands at just 15%. Additionally, he explains that agentic AI needs to know more about the organizations and how they think and work. Access to live operational data, and knowledge management systems, where the captured knowledge is organized and activated.
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‎In Sub-Saharan Africa, despite progress made across governance and policy capacity, gaps persist in advancing readiness, namely; AI infrastructure and public sector adoption.

The AI on Sale

For the education sector, experts say that the value proposition is shifting and universities need to reinvent the way they deliver value to the students in the age of AI.

Adversio for Universities is a content management system (CMS) built with Agentic AI tools to ease and facilitate university administration and services. Implemented in Africa by Arxia, uptake cost is based on student number, tagged at barely a dollar per student per month.

The coalition between Vision Africa AI, Arxia, and the Uganda Vice Chancellors’ Forum (UVCF), which is focused on sharing knowledge, information and practices among Uganda’s higher education institutions, proposes a makeover in AI uptake.

“This kind of forum can help universities to put their hands together. Some of these technologies are expensive, but if they work together as some kind of consortiums, then they are able to share some resources and pay for them jointly,” says Dr. James Onyoin, the board chairperson, Vision Africa AI.

As part of the integrated digital management platforms for universities, Adversio intends to avail crucial data regarding attendance and grading as its essential pack includes admission, course management and scheduling, plus graduation assessment.

Although UVCF confirms to be rolling out initiatives like partnerships with market experts to lessen the cost of AI tools, the forum’s ICT lead, Ronald Balimunsi, informs that infrastructure including servers and data storage, plus reliable internet require timely investment which is still unyielding.

Regional insight further points to Kenya which has for long been a continental innovation hub. Data from Genome shows that in 2024 alone, Kenyan startups secured $638m (Sh2.39tn) in funding, representing nearly 29% of the total capital raised across Africa.

Lessons

The failure of many AI projects in Uganda has also been attributed to the absence of internal company workflows and capacity. In response, Arxia advises that AI needs to be modelled with access to organisational skills, company policies, and data governance protocols.

As the AI landscape evolves, so has the regulatory environment. For the European Union (EU), the AI act adopted by the European Parliament in 2024 sets forth safe guards with prohibitions against eight unacceptable AI risks covering practices like harmful AI-based manipulation and deception.
 
Rules for general-purpose AI models such as ChatGPT and Gemini also came into effect from August 2025 and aim to protect transparency and copyright. Measures targeting high-risk AI are slated to come into effect in two tranches. One in August this year and the next in August 2027.

‎‎‎While AI adoption proves to be inevitable, adopting self-built AI tools that answer local challenges is among Uganda’s industrial venture. Last October, there was some success in natural language processing (NLP), as Sunbird AI unleashed Sunflower.

However, cyber resilience is equally foundational. To address risks like exposure of sensitive organizational data such as finance, organizations have been tasked to undertake risk assessments, setting boundaries on which datasets to use and those not to.