Zanzibar’s Ministry of Communications, Information Technology and Innovation signed a three-year memorandum of understanding with Emerson Education Institute on 16 August 2026 to train public servants in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. The first cohort will include 600 officials, with classes capped at 50 students each.
Who Gets Trained, Who Pays
Minister Mudrik Ramadhan Soraga and Emerson director Faizan Majidhusain formalized the pact in Unguja. The ministry’s Director of Cybersecurity and Data Protection, Khalfan Mohamed Othman, also attended the signing. The arrangement puts public servants inside a training pipeline built by state officials and an outside institute, all under the banner of “digital governance and security.” Ordinary people don’t get a say in any of it. They just live under the systems these officials are being prepared to run.
The agreement sits on top of the Zanzibar Digital Government Strategy 2023–2027 and the Zanzibar Five Year Development Plan 2021-2025, which identified the creative and digital economy as a priority area for economic transformation. That’s the language of managed modernization: plans, strategies, priorities, and budgets drawn up above everyone else’s heads, then sold as progress.
Zanzibar is allocating 53.39 billion Tanzanian shillings to digital transformation in the 2026/2027 financial year. The article said that equals about US$20.2 million at 2,645.24 shillings to the dollar on 16 August 2026. Soraga presented the budget on 2 June 2026 at Chukwani. The money flows through the apparatus first. The people at the bottom are expected to absorb the consequences later.
The Institutions Building the Net
Zanzibar’s Office of the Controller and Auditor General announced a separate partnership in April 2026 with India’s Supreme Audit Institution to build staff expertise in cybersecurity. CAG Dr Othman Abass Ali said the collaboration addresses emerging technology challenges, naming AI, data systems and cybersecurity as key concerns. About 185 Zanzibar auditor staff are due for cybersecurity and AI training over two to three years.
The training will run in two phases, with 45 staff in the first phase at the IIT Madras campus in Bweleo, Zanzibar, and 30 in the second phase at IIT Madras in Chennai and the National Audit Academy in New Delhi. That’s a long chain of institutional coordination for a system that still concentrates power in the same hands. The audit machinery gets more technical. The hierarchy gets more efficient.
UNESCO Dar es Salaam and the Zanzibar Correctional Facility ran a three-day program from 14 to 16 July 2026 that trained 32 correctional officers at Chuo cha Mafunzo. The course covered cyber safety, prompt engineering, AI-assisted research and responsible AI use aligned with UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI. Participants learned to detect AI-generated media and to use offline AI solutions for secure environments. Commissioner Col. Khamis Bakari Khamis oversaw the initiative, which included action plans for integrating AI into daily operations.
What They Call Security
The correctional facility training makes the logic plain. AI isn’t arriving as liberation here. It’s being folded into prisons, audits, and administrative control, with “security” doing the usual work of justifying tighter management. The article says the participants learned to detect AI-generated media and use offline AI solutions for secure environments. That’s the language of containment, not freedom.
The training push also links to the Zanzibar Autonomous Zone, announced in February 2025 with ThreeFold and billed by the partners as the world’s first fully automated Special Digital Economic Zone. In July 2025, the Zanzibar e-Government Authority signed an MoU with Tether on blockchain and digital-asset education. Tether said it would only evaluate supporting integration into ZanMalipo, the government payments gateway.
That’s the whole machine in miniature: ministries, auditors, correctional officers, foreign institutes, digital-payment systems, and special zones, all stitched together under the promise of efficiency. The people at the top call it transformation. The people at the bottom get managed, monitored, and trained to keep the gears turning.