ZAMAI Solutions · Zambia · September 2026

Young Zambians should decide what AI is for here.

Not be consulted. Decide.

Zambia is one of the youngest countries on earth. The decisions being made this year about artificial intelligence, data and work will be lived with longest by the people who were not in the room when they were made.

This is what we propose to do about it.

Where we stand

Briefly, and every figure here is checkable.

375,000 young people reach the labour market each year. About 137,000 jobs are created.
Roughly a third of Zambians use the internet. Around four in five have no smartphone.
The country has about two megawatts of data centre in total, and no AI computing hardware documented anywhere in public sources.
Of seven regional languages, five have no benchmark score on any model. Bemba and Nyanja are thinly represented. The rest are absent.
The law requires data about Zambians to stay in Zambia. There is almost nowhere to put it, and the two legal routes around it have never been used.
Nobody has asked us anything. There is no survey of what Zambians think about AI, and none of whether Zambian businesses use it.

None of this is anyone's bad faith. Rules arrived before the ground was ready, and the people most affected were not at the table. Both of those are fixable.

What we propose

A working group that takes one real problem at a time and works it properly.

Zambian postgraduate researchers, across disciplines, together with people who actually do the work being studied. They define the problem themselves. They find the bottlenecks, including the ones we have not seen. They identify who genuinely decides, work out how to approach them, and go.

We are not proposing a report. We are not proposing a conference. We are proposing that a group of young Zambians does a real piece of work, delivers it to the person who can act on it, and publishes what happened.

How it works

Live problems only. Something is actually being decided, by someone who could act on the answer. A question with a known answer is not a project.
It has to be able to fail. A group that works through our proposal and concludes we were wrong has done the work correctly.
Online first. Someone in Kasama or Mongu takes part on the same terms as someone in Lusaka. In person later, never as the default.
Evidence standards agreed before the work starts, not argued about afterwards.
Everything is delivered to a named recipient. Work that ends in a folder did not happen.
Written up honestly, including what went wrong, so the next group starts further along.

Project one

A Zambian food processor with positive cash flow, long-standing customers and a track record applied for credit to buy grain at harvest, under a facility set up with development money precisely to support businesses like it.

To borrow against grain, the bank required the business to already own the grain. Then it would lend 80 percent of the value. To access the credit you must not need it.

The grain exists. It is sitting in a certified warehouse, graded and insured, with an electronic receipt attached to it. There is a structure in which the bank pays the current holder directly, holds the receipt as its security, releases the grain in batches as it is processed, and is repaid from a contracted buyer paying into an account the bank controls. It is better secured than what the bank does today, not worse.

That is a proposal on the table, and it may be wrong. The work is to find out: what the real bottleneck is, who actually decides, what it would take to change their mind, and what it would mean for the farmers selling at harvest and the children at the other end of it.

It touches innovative financing, impact measurement, traceability, nutrition, law and policy, and the question of where technology genuinely helps and where it is decoration. More projects will follow. This one is also where we build the way of working itself.

What we are not doing

Not founding a new organisation. Good things already exist here. Joining beats founding.
Not waiting for funding before starting. Most of the first work costs time, not money.
Not speaking for young Zambians. The point is that they speak.
Not producing anything nobody asked for. Every output has a recipient who wants it.

Who we are looking for

Postgraduate researchers in any discipline: finance, law and policy, agriculture, logistics, nutrition, statistics, computing, communications. Also people with no degree at all who have bought, stored, moved or sold the things being studied, because a group that never leaves the seminar room produces work that is elegant and wrong.

And anyone who can correct something above. That is the most useful message we could receive.

Take part

Or message us on WhatsApp: +260 776 621 255. We read everything and usually reply the same day.

Or write directly: chris@zamai.pro.