Journal of African Development

Africa's accelerating digital transformation has positioned artificial intelligence as a central engine of economic modernization, spanning fintech, healthcare, agriculture, e-government and retail. Yet the same data-intensive systems that generate this growth expose citizens to escalating privacy risk in an environment where legal structures remain fragmented and enforcement capacity is uneven across the continent's fifty-four jurisdictions. This paper presents an empirical, data-driven investigation into how organizations and individuals across five African countries perceive and manage the tension between AI-led innovation and data-privacy protection. Using a structured survey of two hundred respondents drawn from technology firms, public agencies and civil-society bodies in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Rwanda and Ghana, the study measures sectoral AI adoption, privacy-concern intensity, regulatory awareness and governance readiness. Descriptive and correlational analysis reveals that AI adoption and perceived privacy risk move together, that regulatory awareness lags adoption by a widening margin since 2021, and that governance readiness varies sharply by country, with South Africa and Rwanda outperforming Nigeria on institutional oversight. Five tables and five figures translate these patterns into a coherent empirical account supporting the paper's central claim: innovation and privacy are not zero-sum, but the current pace of AI deployment in Africa is outrunning the protective infrastructure meant to accompany it. The discussion situates these findings against earlier continental surveys and international benchmarks, and the conclusion argues for a co-evolutionary policy model in which regulatory-capacity building is sequenced alongside, rather than after, AI diffusion, with direct implications for African Union digital strategy, national data-protection authorities and firms designing AI systems for African markets..