For African small and medium enterprises (SMEs) trying to enter AI markets, procurement rules are immediate structural barriers that block local innovators from opportunities to grow, hire, and innovate. AI-specific procurement practices, such as bundled contracts and opaque AI algorithms used in procurement selection processes, disadvantage SMEs by reinforcing power asymmetries and allowing global vendors to consolidate control at the expense of local innovators.
This policy brief examines how public-sector and large-scale private procurement frameworks systematically exclude African SMEs from AI value chains by privileging scale, prior track records, compliance-heavy due diligence, and risk-averse contracting – qualities that most African SMEs lack. In doing so, it reveals how, when procurement consistently favours multinational vendors, African governments lose the ability to shape AI systems that reflect and respond to local needs, with particular knock-on effects for national data sovereignty, contextual relevance, democratic oversight and public interest outcomes.
Addressing these concerns by demonstrating how this exclusion constitutes a fundamental justice failure, this policy brief uses the Just AI Framework of Inquiry as a corrective lens to offer recommendations for regulators, governing bodies, AU bodies, and development partners. These recommendations focus on redressing the distribution of AI procurement benefits, risk allocation, the recognition of whose knowledge counts, and value concentration and control, in line with regional transformation strategies and more competitive economic practices. The result is a paper that acknowledges that procurement rules are not neutral, and that reforming them is a strategy for building locally rooted, accountable, and just AI ecosystems.
