Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly embedded in daily life. From education and social media to search engines, e-commerce, healthcare, and transportation, AI increasingly operates behind the scenes, influencing how we live, work, and interact. But what role might AI play in the public sector—specifically, in parliaments? Across Africa, there is growing interest in how AI could support core legislative functions, such as public engagement.
In a continent marked by linguistic diversity, a large youth population, and significant rural-urban divides, AI may present new opportunities to help legislatures connect with citizens. The African Union’s Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy, adopted in 2024, affirms this potential. In a 2025 address, Ethiopian Prime Minister H.E. Abiy Ahmed called AI “the engine of transformation across sectors, geographies, and societies,” and emphasized Africa’s commitment to shaping AI in ways that reflect its own realities.
This explainer explores if and how AI could be used to expand and enhance public engagement in African legislatures, while also examining the risks and limitations that must be addressed.
WHAT IS PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AND COULD AI HELP?
Public engagement is a cornerstone of democratic governance and in many countries, a constitutional right. When citizens can access information, understand what decisions are being made, and contribute meaningfully to policymaking, trust in institutions grows, and so does the quality and relevance of legislation.
At the Parliamentary Centre through our Inclusive Legislatures for Gender-Responsive Policies (ILGRP) program, we have seen firsthand how structured engagement can lead to more inclusive and effective lawmaking:
- In Ghana, civil society organizations supported by our team played a key role in consultations on the Affirmative Action (Gender Equity) Act. Their contributions, based on lived experiences, were reflected in the version of the bill adopted in July 2024.
- In Kenya, we supported a national youth dialogue, where over 500 young people met with Members of Parliament. Using digital polling tools, participants identified top concerns, helping MPs better understand the priorities of a new generation of voters.
However, we continue to hear from lawmakers and civil society leaders that reaching citizens is time-consuming, costly and often logistically challenging. Language diversity, geographic remoteness, and digital access gaps make it harder to engage people outside major cities. As a result, some voices remain underrepresented.
AI – THE OPPORTUNITIES
AI is the science of machines that learn, problem-solve, and make decisions in a human-like fashion. While not always obvious, AI is already being used across a multitude of sectors, powering our search engines, assistive technologies, social media platforms, e-commerce, and transportation systems. But how can a technology built on automation support a process as human as public engagement which is built on lived experience and diverse perspectives? Around the world, parliaments are beginning to explore this question. In practice, the use of AI is already being used to strengthen transparency, improve access to information, and enhance communication between legislators and the public. Here’s how:
- Faster Access to Information: AI tools have the potential to make parliamentary information more accessible by transcribing, translating, and summarizing debates in real time. This can reduce delays in public access to proceedings and help bridge language barriers. However, automated summaries may oversimplify complex legislative discussions, and AI translation tools can struggle with dialects or terms not widely represented in training data, requiring careful oversight and continued human involvement.
Case Example: Canada
Canada’s Parliament uses automated speech recognition to transcribe House of Commons proceedings, giving MPs and the public quicker access to accurate records. To combat some of the above risks, all transcripts are currently reviewed and edited by a transcriber/transeditor before it is delivered to MPs and the public. - Simplifying Complex Information for the Public: AI can summarize complex political language into clear, simplified summaries for the public. In addition to textual summaries, AI can present this information creatively through formats such as podcasts, videos, and interactive visualizations making parliament more transparent.
Case Example: Italy
In Italy, AI powered chatbots are available on the legislature’s website to explain the legislative process and simplify legal texts, helping more citizens understand and engage with policymaking. - Facilitating Public Input: AI presents a promising option for collecting input from a diverse group of people by breaking down language barriers and offering text-to-speech capabilities.Other innovative applications have also been proposed, for example, using AI to monitor social media and news platforms in real time to gauge public sentiment on key policy issues.
Case Example: United Kingdom
In the UK, a research group experimented with using AI to support democratic debate by collecting input on controversial issues and reformulating the arguments. The goal was to present the same core ideas in ways that were less polarizing and more likely to promote constructive dialogue and consensus among people with opposing views.
Case Example: Ghana
In Ghana, the App “DeafCanTalk” uses AI to translate sign language into spoken language and vice versa helping to expand access to public spaces for deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens. Although it is not currently used by the Ghanaian Parliament, the app has supported greater civic engagement by enabling thousands of users to participate more actively in community life and democratic dialogue. - Summarizing Public Input for Lawmakers: When parliaments seek public input on bills, the number of responses can be overwhelming. AI can categorize these responses by theme or sentiment, giving lawmakers a concise, synthesized summary of public opinion. This allows legislators to quickly identify key concerns and areas of support. However, AI-generated summaries are subject to limitations. These systems can misrepresent, omit, or even fabricate information—known in the tech field as “hallucinations.”
For example, when identifying patterns in responses, AI may overemphasize the most common views, while overlooking feedback from under-represented groups or individuals with less mainstream perspectives. In our example above, a research group found success in using AI to reframe input in less polarizing language to promote public dialogue. Yet in a lawmaking context, this can be problematic. Filtering out more extreme or fringe feedback, while helpful for consensus-building, may result in the loss of valuable insights that could inform more inclusive policies.
AI can also struggle with nuance, especially when analyzing minority languages or culturally specific references. This can lead to distorted or oversimplified interpretations that risk reinforcing existing inequalities.
Case Example: Brazil
In Brazil, AI is used to collect citizen comments on bills and legislation and group them by sentiment and topic. These tools generate visual summaries of the public’s opinion, allowing MPs to better understand feedback and identify key areas of concern at a glance.
These initiatives are just the beginning, and discussions on the use of AI in Parliaments across Africa are growing.
THE CHALLENGES TO AI ADOPTION IN AFRICA
Despite growing interest in AI across Africa, its use in governance faces significant challenges, many of which are shared by parliaments around the world as they explore how to harness the technology’s potential.
- Infrastructure, Cost, and Digital Literacy: Many parliaments still lack the digital infrastructure, a challenge compounded by persistent digital divides between and within countries in Africa. The cost of implementation and the need for specialized technical skills remain major barriers. AI systems require regular maintenance, ongoing training, and partnerships with experts, investments that may not always be prioritized. Without coordinated, long-term planning, the introduction of AI risks becoming fragmented or dependent on external support.
Critically, if digital tools are introduced without parallel efforts to maintain inclusive outreach, especially in rural or underserved communities, they could deepen existing inequalities. In places where internet access is limited or digital literacy is low, citizens may be excluded from AI-enabled engagement processes altogether. - Ethical Considerations: AI tools can be misused. In the recent wave of elections across the globe, AI-generated disinformation and deepfakes were used to mislead the public and attack political figures, particularly women, a growing concern known as tech-facilitated gender-based violence. AI can also reinforce historical and structural biases, especially when trained on internet data that lacks representation. This can skew outputs, perpetuate stereotypes, and narrow the diversity of voices in the public discourse.
- The human aspect – Job Loss and human connection lost: Concerns persist that AI will replace human roles or weaken public trust by automating too much. However, current research suggests AI is more likely to reshape roles than eliminate them. Public engagement, in particular, depends on human judgment, lived experience, and diverse perspectives. In this context, AI is best understood as a tool that can support humans, not replace them.
- Environmental Concerns: Generative AI systems contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and high water consumption, due to the energy demands of training models, running data centers, and manufacturing hardware. Its environmental impact must be carefully managed as we explore if and how to introduce it into more aspects of our lives.
As African parliaments navigate the complexities of adopting AI, careful planning, inclusive design, and regional collaboration will be key. With the right safeguards, AI can become a valuable tool for strengthening the relationship between citizens and legislatures.
The Parliamentary Centre’s work in Africa has been a cornerstone of its international initiatives, reflecting a deep commitment to fostering democratic governance across the continent. Through our current project, Inclusive Legislatures and Gender Responsive Governance (ILGRP), we work with three partner parliaments (Ghana, Kenya and Togo) to consider the differential impacts of policies, laws, and budgets on the poorest and most marginalized populations, particularly women and girls. This four-year initiative (2022-2026) is funded by Global Affairs Canada and implemented in partnership with The African Centre for Parliamentary Affairs (ACEPA).
