How Smart Africa Turns Digital Policy Into On The Ground Results with Director Thelma Quaye

What are your thoughts? ***International Telecoms Week x Datacloud Africa 2026 Conference Podcast Edition*** **Director of Digital Infrastructure, Skills and Empowerment, Thelma Quaye -** Smart Africa.   Everyone wants to talk about AI, but the uncomfortable truth is that compute capacity isn’t evenly owned and access to GPUs can turn into a geopolitical lever. So we step back and ask a more useful question: where can Africa realistically win in the AI value chain over the long term? From Nairobi at International Telecommunications Week, we sit down with a Smart Africa leader to unpack what “building Africa’s single digital market” actually means in practice and why implementation on the ground is the difference between another report and real change. We get candid about the gap between programs that bring women and girls into tech and the harder work of helping women stay. Career breaks, fast-moving tools, workplace pressure, and the time cost of networking can push talented engineers and technologists out of the field. We also explore what pan-African thinking looks like beyond slogans: clustering countries to create economies of scale, building cross-border friendly rules, and treating neighbors as part of your market, not competitors. Then we zoom in on digital infrastructure investment, data centers, and energy. Investors ask blunt questions about workload and power, and smaller markets often struggle to compete alone. We talk through a practical toolkit approach that helps developers find aligned investors faster and helps governments become “investor-ready” through targeted capacity building. If you care about Africa digital transformation, data center investment, cloud infrastructure, AI readiness, and women in tech, this conversation connects the dots with clarity and urgency. If this gave you a new lens, subscribe, share it with a friend in policy or tech, and leave a review with the one change you think would unlock faster progress. Credits Host:  - Stella Gichuhi Producer:  - James Njoroge Executive Producers: - Harry Hare - Agutu Dan