AI Safety Essentials Fellowship
A 7-week facilitated group learning experience mapping what AI safety work actually looks like — how the world is working to contain risks from Transformative AI, and where you can plug in. Participants spend ~5 hrs/week on pre-reading and live calls, and leave with a concrete portfolio project proposal or an acceptance to a next-step pathway for in-depth learning.
7 Weeks • Virtual & Facilitated
~5 hrs/week commitment: curated pre-reading plus a live facilitated group call each week, guiding you through the AI safety landscape with peers from across Africa.
Direct Mentorship & Links
Connect with leading international AI safety researchers, governance fellows, and peer builders from over 10 African countries.
Capstone Projects & Grants
Graduates receive guidance to apply for international fellowships, grant funding, research internships, and chapter leadership roles.
Comprehensive 6-Week Curriculum Breakdown
AI Safety Foundations
- •Tell us all you know about AI Safety
- •How to read AI Safety Papers
- •Career paths you are considering
- •Community onboarding & introductions
Existential Risks & Catastrophic Vectors
- •Why should we care about global catastrophe prevention?
- •Historical impact of technological shocks in Africa
- •Case studies on risks from unaligned frontier AI systems
- •Frameworks for long-term safety governance
Frontier AI Models and Africa
- •What counts as frontier AI and compute scaling?
- •Capabilities vs. Alignment trade-offs
- •How model evaluation benchmarks work
- •Accounting for African dataset representation gaps
Defining Safe & Beneficial AI
- •Core differences between AI ethics and technical AI safety
- •Socio-technical feedback loops in developing markets
- •Interpretability, robustness, and mechanistic oversight
- •Hands-on red-teaming exercises
Subfields & Alignment Architectures
- •The outer vs. inner alignment problem
- •Local language evaluation and cultural benchmarking
- •Where African technical talent has maximum leverage
- •Intersections between technical alignment and policy
Africa's AI Safety Landscape & Policy
- •Why the Global South must shape frontier AI safety
- •Evaluating regional strategies (AU AI Strategy, Smart Africa)
- •Building independent safety evaluation institutions
- •Becoming an active contributor to global labs and research
Capstone, Fellowships & Career Launch
- •Structuring international research grant proposals
- •Global fellowship pipelines (MATS, ERA, BlueDot, GovAI)
- •Capstone presentations & cohort graduation
Ready to make effective contributions to AI Safety in Africa?
Accepting Expressions of Interest (EOI) for our inaugural cohort.