RAIL KNUST Presents on Successful German-Africa AI Ethics Collaborations at the UNESCO Fostering Ethical AI in Africa Workshop in Germany

Prof. Jerry John Kponyo, Scientific Director and Principal Investigator, RAIL and Cofounder, RAIN Africa, gave a lecture on the Scientific Cooperation Projects on AI Ethics between Germany and Africa with Successful Examples. He mentioned the need for collaboration and said the issues related to AI and ethics are global. Thus, AI solutions need input from a broad spectrum of users, hence the need to collaborate in developing solutions.

“Ethics in AI require buy-in from major stakeholders such as corporate organisations and governments globally. There is a need to collaborate on influencing policy at the highest level”, he stated. 

He mentioned that datasets are critical to developing ethical and accurate solutions and collaborations help to share open datasets. 

“Through collaborations, actors in the AI ecosystem can hold each other accountable”, he added. He reiterated that collaborations are excellent and impactful, and the way to institutionalise ethics in AI is through partnerships.

On the success factors of Academic Collaborations, he gave the following pointers: 

• Commitment to the common good of the collaborators
• Identification of focal persons to drive the collaboration
• Frequent meetings of collaborators to plan and execute agreed activities.
• Being open to new ideas and expansion of the partnership by allowing other like-minded organisations to join
• Funding to support the activities of the collaboration

Prof. Kponyo mentioned the collaborative initiative of TUM Germany and KNUST Ghana, which birthed the Responsible AI Network Africa (RAIN Africa) project as a successful example of Scientific Cooperation Projects on AI Ethics between Germany and Ghana. He indicated that the RAIN Africa project brings together enthusiasts of AI from industry and academia to deliberate on how AI can be leveraged to push the fourth industrial revolution. 

“AI has tremendous potential to drive economies, but there are ethical considerations that need to be considered to ensure that AI is responsibly used to serve humanity; that is the focus of RAIN Africa”, he revealed. 

He stated that the focal persons of RAIN are Prof Lutege of IEAI TUM and Prof Jerry John Kponyo of KNUST. 

He informed that the network, which began as a collaboration between TUM and KNUST, has grown with country reps from Senegal, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Guinea. He added that RAIN currently partners with key global establishments like GIZ Germany, IDRC Canada, IBM, Google, UNESCO, and FAIR Forward on issues relating to AI.

Prof Kponyo revealed that through the experience derived from RAIN, the KNUST team recently won a grant of 1 million Canadian Dollars to set up a Responsible AI Lab (RAIL) with support from IDRC, GIZ, and Fair Forward. 

He stated that through collaborations, there are discussions on incorporating Ethics in AI in the Curriculum of the partner Universities under RAIN. RAIL KNUST has worked with other AI4D Labs in Africa to develop FACETS, a framework for quantitative measurement of responsible AI. He also mentioned the collaboration between RAIN and FAIR-FORWARD to author a book on ethics in AI. In his concluding remarks, Prof. Kponyo said RAIN Africa and RAIL KNUST had become strong voices of advocacy for ethics in AI. The way to affect generations is to include ethical AI in our educational curriculum.“We must build stronger regional and global networks on ethical AI”, he added.