Artificial intelligence could go two ways for persons with disabilities in Africa.
The hopeful version is already visible. Screen readers are getting better. Speech-to-text turns a lecture or a meeting into notes as it happens. Image description, live captions and voice control now come built into ordinary phones and laptops, where they used to be costly extras.
For a student with low vision in Accra, or a freelancer with a mobility disability in Kumasi, tools like these can clear obstacles that policy and infrastructure have not shifted in decades.
The other version is one we have seen before. Each new wave of technology has split people into those who could get it and those who could not. If AI tools are built without persons with disabilities, priced out of reach, or taught only to people who are already well connected, the same split will open again, and faster.
The gap is about access
Most AI tools take for granted a steady internet connection, a capable device and confident digital skills. Many persons with disabilities in Ghana and across Africa are still working to get those basics. AI literacy will not arrive on its own on top of that. Someone has to teach it, and teach it accessibly.
There is a less obvious problem too. AI systems learn from data, and persons with disabilities are thin in that data. A voice assistant that cannot follow atypical speech, or a hiring tool that rejects an unusual CV, carries the assumptions of whoever was counted as normal when it was built. The UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence names inclusion and non-discrimination among its core principles for that reason.
What we are doing about it
We do not think waiting is an option. We want persons with disabilities to be early, confident and sceptical users of AI.
In our programs that means teaching AI literacy head on: what these tools can do, where they fail, and how to check what they produce. It means teaching AI alongside assistive technology, so each learner can combine the two in the way that suits them. And it means getting persons with disabilities into the room with the organizations that build and buy these systems, so accessibility is settled before launch.
The World Health Organization estimates that more than 2.5 billion people need at least one assistive product, and the number is rising. AI will be part of how that need is met. Whether it narrows the disability divide or widens it depends on choices being made now, including here in Ghana.
