The Tools We Don’t Own : Digital Sovereignty in Africa

Learning Document · Egregor Community Event

The Tools We Don't Own

Building resilience across Europe and Africa. Learnings from the Egregor community session on digital sovereignty held online on 15 July 2026, with Yann Dmitri Engoue (AfrikaNova Global Network) and Paschal Onuroah (Perplexity AI), moderated by Vincent Danjean (Interpol, Chair of the Scientific and Ethics Committee at Egregor).

Sections Introduction Hardware Software People Final Perspectives Cross-Cutting Insights Conclusion

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The Tools We Don't Own

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Type
Learning Document
Date
15 July 2026
Languages
FR · EN
Pages
13

What you will find in this document

Most organisations, and most states, run on digital infrastructure owned and controlled by others. This session brought practitioners together around a single question: what does resilience look like under that dependence?

The discussion was structured in three layers. Hardware, where energy proves to be the binding constraint and where the dominant public-private model produces locally owned facilities under foreign operation. Software, where open source converts a licensing cost into a capability cost. And people, where talent emerges as the continent's biggest lever, provided that training carries through to application. Each layer returns to the same finding: sovereignty consists of concrete decisions, about where the data sits, who operates the infrastructure, who writes the code and who is trained to maintain it.

01Introduction
02Part I: Hardware, the Ground Beneath the Stack
03Part II: Software, Licences, Open Source and the Question of Capability
04Part III: People, Talent, Training and Government Capacity
05Part IV: Final Perspectives, Sobriety, Shared Bricks and Purpose
06Cross-Cutting Insights
07Conclusion