South Africa does not appear among the economies with a national AI strategy in a flagship new World Bank report.
South Africa has been excluded from the World Bank’s global map of economies with a national AI strategy, a direct consequence of the collapse of the country’s draft AI policy in April.
The exclusion appears in World Development Report 2026: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, the Bank’s flagship annual publication, released on Tuesday. A note beneath the report’s map of national AI strategies states that South Africa “is not included as an economy with a strategy” because of the withdrawal of the draft national AI policy in April 2026.
The Bank counted more than 80 countries with published national AI strategies as of June 2026, defining a strategy as a standalone, government-led framework setting out a country’s vision and action plan for AI. Its central observation is that the countries with the most to gain from the technology may be the least prepared for it: of 25 low-income countries, only Rwanda had published a dedicated AI strategy, against more than half of high-income economies.
South Africa, an upper-middle-income economy with the most developed technology sector on the continent, now sits outside that group entirely.
Communications minister Solly Malatsi withdrew the draft national AI policy on 26 April after internal checks confirmed its reference list contained fictitious sources. The 86-page document, gazetted on 10 April with 67 references, was found to include citations to academic journal articles that did not exist — most plausibly generated by an AI tool and published without verification.
Malatsi said at the time that the failure was not merely technical and had compromised the policy’s integrity and credibility. He subsequently appointed an independent expert panel chaired by Wits University AI researcher Prof Benjamin Rosman to rebuild the document.
The World Bank’s map reflects the position as at June 2026, but South Africa’s absence from it is unlikely to be corrected soon. The department of communications & digital technologies has told parliament that the panel’s consolidated report is expected in August, with a revised draft going to cabinet in November and public consultation targeted for January 2027.
South Africa will not have a published national AI policy before next year — nearly three years after the National AI Summit that began the process in April 2024.
There is an additional awkwardness in the report itself: the communications department and the department of science, technology & innovation both appear in the World Development Report’s acknowledgements as organisations that provided input, as do communications regulator Icasa and the South African Revenue Service.
The report’s prescription for governments includes reliable electricity, broadband connectivity and foundational literacy, on the argument that these are the complements the private sector will not fund on its own and without which AI tools deliver little.
South Africa fares poorly elsewhere in the report on its electricity supply challenges. In its chapter on AI and the environment, the World Bank identifies Brazil and Malaysia as emerging destinations for hyperscale data centre operations while citing South Africa’s historical chronic load shedding as an illustration of how grid constraints deter large-scale AI investment.