AMN Plus-May 18/2026
At the national conference titled “Data Sovereignty for Policy Independence,” Worku Gachena(PhD), Director General of the Ethiopian Artificial Intelligence Institute, emphasized that Ethiopia is steadily building a sovereign digital infrastructure that will serve as the backbone of the nation’s growth over the coming decade.
Speaking at the conference, he noted that key sectors including agriculture, health, finance, education, and energy have now evolved into practical and strategic sources of data.
He further explained that these data resources are being processed through indigenous cloud technologies, managed locally, and utilized to develop Artificial Intelligence systems capable of communicating in Ethiopian languages.
“If we do not have our own data, our Artificial Intelligence will be meaningless to us; and if we do not have our own Artificial Intelligence, our data will go to waste,” Worku stated.
According to the Director General, the Digital Ethiopia 2030 National Strategy was specifically designed to bridge this gap. The strategy encompasses the establishment of a sovereign cloud data center, a national data lakehouse, and an indigenous Large Language Model (LLM) trained in Amharic, Afan Oromo, Tigrinya, and Somali languages, all operating under full national control.
Concluding the conference, the EAII Director General underscored that the world’s leading nations are those transforming data into productivity, innovation, and new economic value. He stressed that Ethiopia is now actively laying the very foundation required to achieve that same transformation.
