Ensuring responsible AI adoption in African parliaments

The use of AI in parliaments is growing rapidly across Africa. In Mauritius, the National Assembly uses AI to transcribe debates, summarise long sessions, and publish information in multiple languages. In Kenya, the Parliamentary Centre captured top concerns of 500 young Kenyans and used AI to reframe submitted concerns in less polarizing language, giving members of parliament (MPs) insight into the priorities of a new generation of voters. MPs across Africa use AI for their day-to-day operations: automated inbox triage, speech-to-text transcription of debates, AI mediation tools, and more. 

AI adoption is being actively incorporated into parliaments. What needs to follow is a deliberate effort to ensure that AI adoption is approached ethically and responsibly. This requires proactive investments in AI governance frameworks, institutional protocols, and cybersecurity awareness. At IDinsight, we are working closely with three African parliaments that are early adopters of AI: Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In this blog, we share lessons from these partnerships, along with four priorities that parliaments and partners should act on to ensure the responsible adoption of AI.

Understanding what responsible AI adoption looks like

At IDinsight, we believe responsible AI use must go beyond efficiency gains. It should strengthen people’s agency, empower staff rather than replace them, and protect vulnerable populations from harm. In their article, Shaping Responsible AI with Dignity, IDinsight colleagues Tom Wein and Dilshad S explain how achieving this requires grounding AI work in rigour, transparency, and a clear commitment to human dignity. Similarly, the OECD AI Principles, the first intergovernmental standard on AI, promote AI that respects human rights and democratic values.

How does it translate for parliaments?

For parliaments, the stakes are higher. While a corporation optimizes for its shareholders, and an NGO answers to its board and donors, a parliament is accountable to every citizen it represents. When parliamentary staff feed citizen-centric data into public AI tools, they expose information that belongs to the institution and, ultimately, to the public, risking their security. 

To ensure ethical AI adoption within parliaments, its leadership has to drive AI governance deliberately, with dignity, transparency, and accountability. Staff will need to understand the tools they are using and exercise sound judgment about when and how to use them. Furthermore, funders and technical partners must be willing to invest in the unglamorous yet foundational work of building data systems, institutional protocols, and human capacity.  

Our partnership across three African parliaments

In Kenya and Zimbabwe, we’ve worked with research, committee, and budget office staff within Parliaments to build their competencies in AI-assisted qualitative research, literature reviews, document analysis, and infographics generation, paired with responsible use and safeguards. Based on this partnership, we demonstrated AI tools built by IDinsight, such as Ask-a-Metric and ElectionGPT, for data retrieval and searching large document sets to representatives from fifteen African parliaments at the 2025 Association of Parliamentary Librarians in Eastern and Southern Africa (APLESA) conference.

In Zambia, we are collaborating with the National Assembly to strengthen evidence-based governance. We are working to identify AI solutions that can automate routine public query handling, consolidate budget and administrative data, and surface information to MPs in real time during debates and committee hearings.

Our observations

1. Appetite is high, but guardrails are lagging

In April 2025, forty-nine of fifty-four countries signed the Africa Declaration on Artificial Intelligence in Kigali, committing to the sustainable and responsible design, development, deployment, use, and governance of AI in Africa. Yet, as of April 2026, fewer than 50% of African countries have published or drafted a national AI strategy. This goes to show that very few parliaments are actually systematically implementing AI beyond early-stage engagement. 

2. Strategic vision and local relevance cannot be imported

The Inter-Parliamentary Union’s guidelines for AI in parliaments provide institutions with a starting point, but they stop short of the day-to-day operational checkpoints parliaments need. This gap may be a blessing in disguise. Outsourcing governance frameworks to international institutions might not meet local demands. As research shows, AI systems originating in high-income settings often fail to address the priorities, resource constraints, and use cases of African parliaments. This calls for a local approach: each parliament building its own governance framework, with the right voices in the room.

3. There is openness for cross-collaboration

If imported models fall short, the alternative is regional. Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe share similar realities in data infrastructure, cost constraints, and policy frameworks, and the three governments are keen to learn from one another. We saw this appetite firsthand at the 2025 Association of Parliamentary Librarians in Eastern and Southern Africa (APLESA) conference in Namibia, where representatives from fifteen African parliaments engaged with practical AI tools for data retrieval and searching large document sets. Such cross-collaboration will yield more sustainable adoption pathways than any framework or tool brought in from outside.

Priorities for parliaments and partners working with them

From our work across Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, we noted four priority areas of work that need to be addressed: 

1. Establishing clear operating guidelines on data use, tool selection, and verification. During our engagements, we noticed that Parliamentary staff were using public AI tools based on personal judgment. There was limited monitoring of data flows within platforms. As of now, there is no consistent approach for identifying and mitigating hallucinations. This calls for a dedicated parliamentary AI task force that sets clear operating guidelines for data use, tool selection, and verification as prerequisites. This is essential to ensure that the information underpinning country-wide policy decisions remains trustworthy.

2. Planning for infrastructure, talent, and cost constraints. The World Bank and Khan et al. note that many low- and middle-income countries continue to grapple with limited access to high-quality digitized data, paper-based records, fragmented archives, and inadequate digital storage. Specialized staff who can build and maintain secure in-house tools are scarce, and the costs of advanced AI tools and secure cloud infrastructure compete directly with fundamental needs like education, healthcare, and energy. Parliaments and partners need to budget realistically for infrastructure, talent, and recurring costs at the outset, rather than treating them as afterthoughts once a tool is chosen.

3. Fortifying data systems before layering AI on top. AI systems are only as strong as the data they rely on. Fragmented, incomplete, or poorly digitized parliamentary records undermine the reliability of AI tools. The first step to mitigate this is fortifying data along with associated M&E and data systems, which includes reorganizing, digitizing, cleaning records, and strengthening indicator frameworks. Once this foundation is set, AI tools can be layered on top. Design considerations should address language and content relevance to local contexts. This is where parliaments could partner with technical institutions such as IDinsight to build the necessary data and evidence foundation without overstretching internal capacity.

4. Building confident, informed users of AI. A tool is only as good as the judgment of the person using it.  Staff need to understand how AI operates, that it can hallucinate, and how to prompt it effectively to produce reliable outputs. Without that understanding, staff either defer to the tool uncritically or avoid it altogether. Practical guidelines on prompting, tool selection, data security, and verification are needed to train parliamentary staff. This will build an ecosystem of confident, informed technology users, capable of exercising sound judgment about when AI tools are appropriate and of leveraging them for efficiency rather than automatically deferring to them.

Looking forward

Every parliament needs a roadmap that outlines where to start, what to build toward, and how to ensure AI serves governance and decision-making. 

• For partners and funders, this means investing not just in tools and end-of-project evaluations, but in the data infrastructure, governance frameworks, and human capacity that determine whether those tools deliver in the first place. 
• For parliamentary staff, it means engaging with AI as informed participants rather than passive recipients. 
• For citizens, it means insisting that the institutions representing them remain open, explainable, and accountable, as they modernize.

When deployed effectively by parliaments, AI can significantly extend the reach and quality of policy measures for their populations. 

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IDinsight partners with parliaments and funders to build the data foundations, governance M&E frameworks, and staff capacity required for responsible AI adoption. In Kenya and Zambia, IDinsight would like to explore deploying various AI tools that enhance public participation and improve transparency in how submissions inform parliamentary deliberations.

To discuss partnership opportunities, contact us at inquire@idinsight.org