One of the architects of Kenya’s digital transformation joins Self Labs to guide its sovereign AI work, focused initially on East Africa

NAIROBI and SAN FRANCISCO. Self Labs, the Silicon Valley company building sovereign AI and privacy-preserving identity infrastructure, today announced that Prof. Bitange Ndemo has joined the company as Strategic Advisor on Sovereign AI, with an initial focus on Kenya and East Africa.

Few people anywhere have done more to shape a nation’s digital trajectory. As Permanent Secretary of Kenya’s Ministry of Information and Communication from 2005 to 2013, Prof. Ndemo drove the reforms and infrastructure that gave rise to Kenya’s “Silicon Savannah”: he championed the TEAMS undersea fibre-optic cable that first connected East Africa to the global internet at scale, presided over the policy environment in which M-PESA grew into the world’s leading mobile-money system, and launched the Kenya Open Data Initiative, the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2018, he chaired Kenya’s Distributed Ledgers Technology and Artificial Intelligence Taskforce, the government body charged with charting how Kenya should harness blockchain and AI, and one of the earliest national AI policy efforts on the continent. He has since served as Kenya’s Ambassador to Belgium and the European Union, and is a longtime Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Nairobi, a widely read columnist on technology and development, and co-editor of “Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making.” He holds a PhD in industrial economics and has advised international institutions including the United Nations on data, digital payments, and the technology-enabled development agenda.

Artificial intelligence is becoming the defining infrastructure of this century, as foundational as energy grids or financial systems. Yet for most nations, the models their citizens increasingly rely on are built abroad, trained on foreign data, aligned to foreign values, and operated under foreign law. Organizations and governments throughout the world are working to address this critical issue through the introduction of sovereign AI, with Self Labs leading the charge. Last week, Self announced two milestone efforts to progress these efforts: an initiative with UNICEF Digital Inclusion and the Connect and Compute Foundation for compute access in emerging markets, and a partnership with BDG Agency to expand AI access throughout the Balkan region, beginning with North Macedonia.

East Africa illustrates both the challenge and the opportunity: Swahili is spoken by an estimated 200 million people, yet remains an afterthought for the world’s frontier AI systems, while the region’s digital rails, from mobile money to digital government, are among the most advanced in the world. Prof. Ndemo will advise Self Labs on the design and positioning of its sovereign AI offering for governments and public institutions, on its approach to Kenya and the East African region, and on the evolving global landscape for sovereign and public-interest AI.

“I have spent my career on a simple conviction: that Africans should own the technologies that shape their lives, as builders and not merely as consumers,” said Prof. Bitange Ndemo. “We proved it with mobile money, when Kenya showed the world what leapfrogging looks like. Artificial intelligence is the next test, and the stakes are higher, because whoever controls the models controls what our children learn and how our institutions think. Self Labs is building the approach I believe in: nationally owned models, run on local infrastructure, auditable by local institutions, and accessible to every citizen. I am delighted to help bring it to East Africa first.”

“Prof. Ndemo is one of the very few people who has actually built national digital infrastructure that changed how the world thinks about what is possible in emerging markets,” said Rene Reinsberg, CEO of Self Labs. “He saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would become a question of sovereignty, chairing Kenya’s AI taskforce years before most governments had the topic on their agenda. There is no better guide for our work in East Africa, a region with the talent, the rails, and the motivation to define what sovereign AI looks like for the world.”

Central to that vision is Universal Basic Compute (UBC): the principle that every citizen deserves a basic allocation of AI capability, in their own language, on whatever device they have, free at the point of use, and delivered in a privacy-preserving way, with no biometric collection of any kind. Where universal basic income distributes money, UBC distributes productive capability, seeding entrepreneurship, skills, and economic participation.

The appointment comes as global attention turns to the region: Nairobi hosts the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in December 2026, under the theme “Governing the Internet in the Age of Intelligence.”

About Self Labs

Self Labs builds sovereign AI and privacy-preserving identity infrastructure for nations and their citizens. Its zero-knowledge identity technology lets people prove facts about themselves using documents from more than 180 countries without ever surrendering personal data, and is trusted in production by leading global partners.

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