Every major international AI governance initiative of the past two years has included African participation. In nearly every case that participation has taken the form of consultation on a framework already drafted, at a stage where the structural decisions have been settled and what remains is wording.
This is not a complaint about being excluded from a room. It is a point about sequence. The decisions that matter in AI governance — what counts as high risk, who bears the compliance burden, which languages the transparency obligations assume — are made when the framework is designed, not when it is reviewed.
What is at stake in the detail
Compliance regimes designed around well-resourced regulators export badly. A transparency requirement that assumes an auditing body with technical staff produces, in a country without one, an obligation that only multinationals can satisfy — which entrenches exactly the market position that governance was meant to check.
The alternative is not isolation
Continental and national frameworks that start from local enforcement capacity and local languages will diverge from the European template. That divergence is a feature. Regulation that fits the state that has to enforce it is worth more than harmonisation with a regime nobody can implement.