This is exactly the kind of response I was hoping the post would generate, thank you genuinely. I was familiar with Cecil’s work at ILINA and the African Hub at UCT, but Sumaya’s CASA centre is new to me and I am going down that rabbit hole right now. The Oxford AIGI connection is particularly interesting given the intergovernmental policy.
What strikes me reading these is that the ecosystem is more alive than it appears from the outside, the problem is not that the work does not exist, it is that it is not visible enough to the broader EA and AI safety community, which is part of what I was trying to address with the post. These efforts deserve to be in the same conversations as the Anthropic safety teams and the GovAI fellows, not operating in parallel universes.
I will reach out to Cecil and Sumaya directly. If anyone reading this thread is working on connecting these dots more systematically — building the network between African AI safety researchers and the global safety ecosystem, I would love to talk. That connective tissue is precisely what I am trying to build through AI Safety Nigeria, and collaboration is worth far more than duplication.
Thank you again for these pointers. This thread is already doing what good EA Forum threads should do.
Thank you for your important work! You’re probably already speaking to them, but in this broader community and adjacent, I recommend the work of:
For ‘role of Africa in frontier AI safety’ isseues
Cecil Abungu’s team’s work at ILINA https://www.ilinaprogram.org/research
Sumaya Nur Adan’s work, with her new CASA centre and also with OMS AIGI in Oxford https://aigi.ox.ac.uk/people/sumaya-nur-adan/
For more locally-focused safety work, the African Hub on AI Safety, peace and security
https://ai.uct.ac.za/african-hub-ai-safety-peace-security and relatedly this white paper from the Global Centre on AI Governance
https://www.globalcenter.ai/research/toward-an-african-agenda-for-ai-safety
(among others, of course).
This is exactly the kind of response I was hoping the post would generate, thank you genuinely. I was familiar with Cecil’s work at ILINA and the African Hub at UCT, but Sumaya’s CASA centre is new to me and I am going down that rabbit hole right now. The Oxford AIGI connection is particularly interesting given the intergovernmental policy.
What strikes me reading these is that the ecosystem is more alive than it appears from the outside, the problem is not that the work does not exist, it is that it is not visible enough to the broader EA and AI safety community, which is part of what I was trying to address with the post. These efforts deserve to be in the same conversations as the Anthropic safety teams and the GovAI fellows, not operating in parallel universes.
I will reach out to Cecil and Sumaya directly. If anyone reading this thread is working on connecting these dots more systematically — building the network between African AI safety researchers and the global safety ecosystem, I would love to talk. That connective tissue is precisely what I am trying to build through AI Safety Nigeria, and collaboration is worth far more than duplication.
Thank you again for these pointers. This thread is already doing what good EA Forum threads should do.