Govt deepens digital sovereignty drive with AI partnership

The government on Monday launched a new phase of its digital transformation through a partnership with African artificial intelligence firm Amini, aiming to boost technological capacity and strengthen the island’s control over its data infrastructure.

Amini is delivering a 12-week fellowship programme aimed at training a cohort of young local technologists who will play a direct role in digitising government data systems.

The participants of the 12-week training course. (SZB)

Speaking at the launch of the programme at the Ministry of Industry, Innovation, Science and Technology (MIST) in Warrens, Amini founder and chief executive officer Kate Kallot said the collaboration with the ministry had been under way for more than two years and was designed to fundamentally reposition Barbados in the global digital landscape.

“We’ve been working now for more than two years with MIST, deploying everything that I’ve shown you as a stack from the smaller modular data centres all the way up to the applications with full governments,” she said, adding that the partnership’s goal was “to position Barbados as a sovereign tech-forward knowledge island”.

Once the roadmap is fully implemented, Barbados would have control over its own digital backbone, Kallot explained.

“By that time, Barbados will have its own computer resources. All the data from governments will be digitised and in a way that can be analysed. We would have built the first set of local applications and we would have also built the local capacity that enabled this work to continue strengthening and lasting across the country,” she said.

Amini founder and chief executive officer Kate Kallot addressing the audience. (SZB)

The initiative was focused on long-term sustainability, said Kallot. “It’s really about creating strong local capacity in innovation, in deep technology, in AI, so that the country can have sovereignty not just today, but also for the years to come and enable the next generation of AI developers in the country to basically flourish and sprout.”

Highlighting the scale of the challenge, Kallot said much of the data currently held by the public sector was fragmented and not fit for advanced analysis.

“A lot of the data today in our country is very unstructured, very scattered, is not digitised, can be sitting in some of our government’s desks in paper format, can be in Excel spreadsheets, in PDF,” she said. “So we had to build a system that allowed us to take that very messy and unstructured data and transform it in contextualised data pipelines.”

This processing layer was paired with the development of locally relevant AI models, she said. “We’ve been working to build the first layer of foundational models for our countries, which allows them to now be able to process a lot of the large amount of data that we’ve digitised into a single layer of models that are calibrated and validated for our context,” Kallot said. This, she added, would enable the rapid development of applications tailored to national needs, including an AI productivity workspace for government built entirely on local data. “It’s not a large language public model. It’s actually very much contextualised and anchored in a country’s context,” she said.

Amini’s broader mission was described as moving countries from fragmented digital systems to full technological self-determination. “[Once] a country has the baseline to be able to run and accelerate adoption of AI applications, [it] means today a country can have sovereignty and agency over their own compute, can have their own local data, can have their own local foundation models, and can provide access to these resources to every developer in the country,” Kallot said. “When Amini is successful, we would have enabled every country in the global south to have that sovereignty and that agency over their own sovereign data infrastructure.”

Minister of Industry, Innovation, Science and Technology Senator Jonathan Reid said the fellowship marked a critical shift in how the government viewed its own transformation. He described the moment as “important for the transition of the ministry and most importantly the transition of how government sees itself”, adding that “the core of all of that is gonna be around talent”.

Ten young people have been selected to participate in the training.

Amini was selected as a partner because of its alignment with Barbados’s digital ambitions, said Reid. “We looked around the world and we found an incredible global partner, with incredible skill, incredible sense of values around the idea of enhancing global south digital sovereignty.” He described Amini as an “outstanding partner in the work that we’ve been doing so far and much more to come”.

The multi-year partnership with Amini would extend beyond training into the development of critical infrastructure, the minister added.

“From high performance computers to data centres to having better capacity in terms of our cloud infrastructure, all these things are part of the frameworks that we’re going to be building,” he said, stressing that these investments were essential to improving how the country functioned. “Those things are fundamental to actually making the country work better, whether it’s management of our safety, management of our traffic, management of our day-to-day lives and our finances.”

(SZB)