Africa’s Peace Tech Movement Confronts Power, Funding, and Control

On a midweek afternoon at the Moniepoint Stage, the conversation drifted toward an uncomfortable comparison. War technology attracts capital at scale. Peace technology struggles for it. No one on the panel needed to dramatize the gap. It hung there in plain view.

The session, moderated by Tem Mbuh of Open Society Foundations, brought together David Lemaiyan, regional director for Eastern and Southern Africa at Open Mapping Hub, and Naomi Kilungu, founder of AI for Peace Africa. The theme was straightforward: technology’s role in building a peaceful continent. The undertone was less tidy.

Capital flows tell their own story. Investors have little hesitation backing drones, surveillance hardware, and defense analytics in fragile regions from the Sahel to the Horn. Returns are calculable. Buyers are governments. Budgets are structured. Peace tech, by contrast, sits in a grey zone. Its customers are diffuse. Its outcomes are long-term. Its return on investment is often measured in crises avoided rather than contracts secured.

That tension framed the discussion. Peace tech in Africa is not just a technical project. It is an economic argument competing with a far more established market logic.

Youth Mappers and the Politics of Visibility

Lemaiyan spoke about something deceptively simple: young volunteers scanning satellite imagery, identifying damaged schools and hospitals, tagging settlements that would otherwise go unseen. It sounds procedural. It is not.

In conflict zones, being visible can determine whether humanitarian aid arrives at all. Platforms pioneered by groups such as Ushahidi demonstrated years ago that crowdsourced data could document violence when official channels failed. That model seeded a generation of civic technologists across East Africa.

The mechanics are technical. Geospatial analysis. Open-source intelligence. Layered mapping. But the underlying contest is political. Who gets counted. Who gets prioritized. Whose data is credible.

There is a subtle inversion here. The people producing much of the data are often university students, volunteers, diaspora technologists. The institutions acting on it include global NGOs and UN agencies. Power flows in both directions. The mapper in Nairobi may influence a medical deployment in Sudan. The volunteer in Kampala may alter a logistics route in northern Kenya.

Yet visibility cuts both ways. Mapping conflict can empower communities, but it can also expose them. That ethical tension remains largely unresolved in the rush to scale digital monitoring.

“Whose Peace Are We Building?”

When Kilungu launched AI for Peace Africa, she encountered a blunt question at a global AI summit in Uganda. Peace for whom. The question lingered.

In cities such as Nairobi, often described as a regional economic springboard, peace is assumed as baseline. In parts of Sudan or eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, it is a daily negotiation. The same AI model cannot simply be exported across those contexts. Data sets differ. Risk profiles differ. Political sensitivities differ.

Fiona Asuke, program manager for Transformative Peace in Africa at Open Society Foundations, pushed the room toward a harder line of inquiry. Technology represents power. It encodes priorities. It reflects the interests of funders.

If a peace tech platform is financed by an international donor headquartered thousands of kilometers away, what assumptions shape its design. If it is trained on data scraped from Western media, what blind spots persist. If it aims to predict conflict escalation, whose definition of escalation governs the model.

These are not academic questions. They shape resource allocation. They influence which communities receive early warning alerts. They determine whose grievances are legible to an algorithm.

Peace tech in Africa sits at that intersection of code and contestation. The technology may be neutral in architecture. Its deployment rarely is.

The Intervention Gap in Fragile States

A question from a Sudanese participant cut through the theory. Monitoring conflict is one thing. Intervening is another.

Sudan has faced decades of sanctions and financial isolation. A fragmented banking system complicates cross-border payments. International tech firms often avoid operating in such environments. Compliance risks are high. Infrastructure is weak. Legal exposure is unclear.

Kilungu acknowledged the problem. Data collection in conflict zones is dangerous. Internet penetration is uneven. Localized AI models require granular, ground-level information that is difficult to obtain without endangering field researchers. In many cases, data flows through large international institutions whose perspectives may not reflect local realities.

The result is an intervention gap. Peace tech platforms can map hotspots, model trends, generate alerts. Converting those outputs into direct support, whether financial transfers, supply chain coordination, or psychosocial services, is harder. It demands partnerships with local actors, community trust, and regulatory clarity.

There are efforts to build that bridge. Youth networks in diaspora communities are contributing data. Regional tech hubs are experimenting with localized AI systems tailored to specific border towns or conflict corridors. Still, the scale remains modest compared to the magnitude of need.

War Economies Versus Peace Economies

Underneath the technical discussion lies a harsher economic structure. War creates markets. Arms procurement. Security contracting. Intelligence software. These sectors operate within formal budget lines and procurement frameworks. They are normalized.

Peace technology, by contrast, competes for philanthropic grants and limited public funding. It promises stability, prevention, reconstruction. The financial upside is diffuse and often indirect.

Lemaiyan argued that peace investment yields durable returns, though not always in quarterly cycles. Countries that maintain relative stability tend to attract capital and sustain growth. Kenya’s economic trajectory over the past 20 years is frequently cited as evidence, despite periodic unrest.

But here is the contradiction. The same investors who benefit from stable markets may also have exposure to defense portfolios elsewhere. Global capital does not operate with a single moral center. It hedges.

If peace tech in Africa is to mature beyond pilot projects, it will need new financial models. Blended finance structures that combine philanthropic risk capital with development finance. Public procurement pathways that treat preventive systems as infrastructure rather than charity. Regional regulatory harmonization to reduce compliance friction in fragile states.

None of that happens overnight. It requires political will, not just engineering talent.

From Early Warning to Prevention Systems

Much of the early work in African peace tech focused on early warning. Mapping incidents. Tracking hate speech. Identifying patterns of mobilization. That layer is now relatively mature.

Asuke suggested moving further upstream. Understanding supply chains of violence. Tracking the flow of small arms. Mapping the financial networks that sustain militias. Designing systems that interrupt escalation before it reaches open conflict.

This is complex terrain. Financial tracking requires access to banking data and cross-border transaction records. That raises privacy concerns and regulatory constraints. Supply chain analysis touches on sovereign sensitivities. Governments may resist scrutiny.

There is also the risk of technological overreach. Algorithms can flag anomalies. They cannot replace political negotiation. They cannot substitute for institutional reform.

The temptation, especially in tech circles, is to treat conflict as a systems problem awaiting optimization. The lived experience of war resists that simplification. Trauma, identity, land disputes, historical grievances. These do not lend themselves neatly to dashboards.

Yet the absence of data does not produce justice either. The choice is not between technology and politics. It is about how they interact.

Building a Coalition, Not a Platform

Toward the end of the session, a sophomore asked how to get involved. The response was practical. Join mapping initiatives. Contribute to community projects. Connect through LinkedIn.

The larger point was implicit. Peace tech in Africa will not be built by a single startup or foundation. It requires a coalition across disciplines. Geospatial analysts. Financial investigators. Psychosocial experts. Software engineers. Policy advocates.

There is urgency in that call. Conflicts evolve rapidly. Digital misinformation spreads faster than mediation teams can respond. War economies adapt.

But urgency must be paired with restraint. Poorly designed interventions can inflame tensions. Data misuse can expose vulnerable populations. The stakes are human lives.

The path forward is unlikely to resemble the venture-backed growth curves familiar in consumer tech. It will be uneven. Iterative. At times frustratingly slow.

Still, something is taking shape. A network of African technologists grappling with the political dimensions of their work. Foundations willing to fund ecosystem building rather than single apps. Youth volunteers mapping villages they may never visit.

Peace tech in Africa sits in that space between aspiration and constraint. It does not yet rival the scale of war budgets. It may never. But it is carving out an argument that stability, accountability, and prevention are not soft ideals. They are infrastructural needs.

Whether that argument attracts sustained capital, and whether it withstands political pressure, remains open. The code is being written. The harder part is everything around it.

Go to TECHTRENDSKE.co.ke for more tech and business news from the African continent and across the world. 

Follow us on WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter, and Facebook, or subscribe to our weekly newsletter to ensure you don’t miss out on any future updates. Send tips to editorial@techtrendsmedia.co.ke