On Tuesday, 10 March TikTok’s third annual Sub-Saharan Africa Safer Internet Summit, a two-day event, kicked off in Nairobi, Kenya, with the announcement that an additional $200,000 in ad credits have been made available by TikTok to help support local organisations in sub-Saharan African to expand AI media literacy.
South Africa’s Deputy Minister of the Presidency, Kenny Morolong, opened the TikTok Safer Internet Summit in Nairobi (Image supplied)
This investment builds on the company’s initial $2m AI Literacy Fund launched in November 2025, which awarded 20 global nonprofits to create content that boosts public understanding of AI.
The Summit featured expert panels and discussions on critical topics, including TikTok’s Trust and Safety efforts, protecting young people online, and policy frameworks for responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance.
A key highlight of the Summit was showcasing how TikTok uses AI to transform how people share their creativity and discover new passions, while ensuring the community remains safe through transparent and responsible AI practices.
Digital literacy
In sub-Saharan Africa, TikTok initially supported three organisations to advance digital literacy and combat misinformation:
- Mtoto News Kenya’s child and adolescent-centred digital media company, is creating educational content that helps young people understand and engage responsibly with AI technology.
- Africa Check is expanding its fact-checking work across Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya, equipping audiences with tools to identify AI-generated misinformation and deepfakes.
- CJID the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) is an African technology and knowledge-producing think tank that supports and empowers the African media. Through its independent fact-checking platform, DUBAWA, it amplifies the culture of truth in public discourse and combats information disorder in the ecosystem.
“With the rapid advancement of AI, we are committed to educating our community online so they feel empowered to have responsible experiences with AI, whether that’s as viewers or creators.
“We are partnering with trusted local organisations that communities already know and rely on, because their expertise and deep local connections are essential to making AI literacy programs truly impactful,” says Valiant Richey, global head of partnerships, elections & market integrity at TikTok.
Transparency and human oversight
TikTok’s mission as a discovery platform is to inspire creativity and bring joy. As part of these efforts, the platform leverages AI to power a range of tasks, including content moderation models that help protect the platform, tools that empower creativity, and recommendation systems that help people discover content and creators they love.
Delegates at the Summit learned about TikTok’s multi-layered approach to AI transparency:
- Including requirements for creators to label realistic AI-generated content (AIGC)
- Advanced detection technology
- The platform’s partnership with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA)
- Use of technologies like Content Credentials and invisible watermarking, which make it easier to identify and label AI-generated content across online platforms.
TikTok also shared more about how recent advancements in AI are helping the platform moderate content faster and more consistently at scale, by improving automated moderation and empowering human teams with better moderation tools.
With over 100 million pieces of content uploaded daily to TikTok, these advances, which work alongside human moderation teams, are helping get violative content down faster, reducing the likelihood of the community seeing it.
According to the latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Q3 2025, TikTok removed over 14 million videos across sub-Saharan Africa with 96.7% detected and removed proactively using automated technology underscoring TikTok’s commitment to proactive moderation and swift action.
Commitments to advance digital safety
The Summit concluded with commitments from attendees to continue advancing digital safety initiatives across sub-Saharan Africa, building on the partnerships and insights shared during the two-day event.”
As we host the 3rd Annual Safer Internet Summit here in Kenya, our mission is clear: to share learnings, insights, tackle common challenges and collaboratively advance actionable solutions that protect citizens online,” says Tokunbo Ibrahim, head of government relations and public policy, sub-Saharan Africa at TikTok.
The event brought together government officials, regulators, online safety partners and industry leaders under the theme #SaferTogether: ‘Innovation and Safety’.“
By bringing together a diverse coalition of policymakers, tech innovators, and creators, we are ensuring that the conversations we have at this Summit are all-inclusive and lead to a more resilient digital landscape,” adds Ibrahim.
Deputy Minister of the Presidency of the Republic of South Africa, Kenny Morolong, adds, “We are pleased to be in Nairobi this week reinforcing the strong partnership between South Africa and Kenya.
“By attending TikTok’s Safer Internet Summit today, we look forward to collaborating on advancing responsible AI governance, enhancing content transparency, and strengthening digital safety measures to ensure integrity in AI systems and secure online environments for all users across the continent, including South Africa.”
The Summit is a significant expansion of the Summit series that began in Ghana in 2024 and continued in Cape Town last year, deepening partnerships with governments and regulators across the Sub-Saharan African region to tackle evolving digital safety challenges.
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