Technology needs local intelligence: navigating Africa’s changing regulatory skies

The more sophisticated technology becomes, the more important human relationships and local intelligence may become, particularly when working across 54 varied African jurisdictions, says legal tech expert Beulah Lüttig.

“The only consistent thing is change in this environment,” says Beulah, a South African-admitted attorney and Director at Afriwise LawExplorer. Technology is helping manage that change, she adds, but experience and understanding remain crucial when information does not appear where, or how, it is expected.

Beulah will explore that intersection at next month’s GC Forum Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC), being held in Johannesburg on 7 October. Her session, “Clearing the Fog Over 54 Skies: AI, Anticipation, and the Future of In-House Legal”, considers how AI-enabled monitoring can help in-house teams move from reacting to regulatory developments, towards anticipating them.

While AI may change the tools available, the need to understand what happens on the ground is not new. Beulah points to South Africa and Namibia: neighbours with deep business and cultural connections that can appear closely related, from afar. “Even though on the face we look like cousins, we’ve got completely different jurisdictional systems,” she says. “The way that their regulators operate is completely different to ours.”

The written laws and regulations only provide part of the picture. 

“Just because something is written as a statute in a certain jurisdiction doesn’t mean that it gets implemented, because it might be against the values of that particular community.”

That is where the idea of simply scraping African regulatory information into technology platforms can run into the practical realities on the ground.

Beulah recalls a government gazette portal in one African jurisdiction being hacked at a critical point in the nation’s parliamentary calendar. Automated monitoring stopped finding new material. But the Sentinel Monitoring team knew something was wrong: at that time of year, silence was itself unusual.

They started making calls. Eventually, someone physically drove to the printers, obtained a contact and arranged for the material to be emailed directly that afternoon. “Knowing when to ask questions when things are not coming through or where there are gaps” is vital, Beulah says.

Nor is that an isolated challenge. 

Two jurisdictions Afriwise monitors have taken their gazettes offline in the past six months, she says, requiring physical copies to be obtained and scanned in-country. Technology can help manage that complexity, but Afriwise’s strong connections with many law firms across the continent add another layer: people on the ground who can flag a new ombudsman or regulator, or where responsibilities are shifting. “It’s a constant moving target in all of these jurisdictions, but it’s not the same target,” says Beulah.

But more regulatory activity does not necessarily mean more difficulty. It can also be a sign of economies and regulatory systems coming into their own.

Beulah points to Tanzania, Malawi, and Angola, where she says regulatory activity has increased considerably since she began monitoring their alerts in 2014, including in areas such as data privacy and cybersecurity.

“There’s definitely been a rebirth of confidence on the continent,” she says, noting that attitudes within African are no longer as deferential to foreign jurisdictions and overseas experts. “We actually know what we’re doing. We hear you, but we don’t agree with you. And this is actually how it should be done for us, here.”

She sees that confidence in the regulators and legal and compliance professionals she deals with across Africa, describing a strong sense of pride in what people are doing in-country and deep knowledge within public institutions.

For Beulah, the importance of human connection extends beyond regulatory intelligence. At last year’s GC Forum GRC, she recalls meeting four or five people for the first time, after communicating with them by email for more than a decade.

She’s looking forward to “being in the room” in Johannesburg on 7 October with fellow professionals and governance, risk, and compliance stakeholders and experts, discussing key challenges and solutions. “It makes such a difference seeing people face to face. It brings a different element to the relationship.”

That has particular resonance as lawyers debate how profoundly AI may change their profession. “You must not be a barrier in the face of technology,” she says.

AI, she believes, is similarly becoming a tool lawyers are learning to work with. 

African professionals, in particular, have long been accustomed to finding solutions when circumstances change. “We won’t wait passively for something, we’ll go make a plan,” Beulah says. “That resilience, and also just constantly being in solution mode, is something that comes very naturally to us.”

And as technology becomes more capable, Beulah believes something distinctly human may become more valuable too. “The more techie we’ll get, the more important relationships, face-to-face relationships will get.”

Beulah will be speaking at the second GC Forum | Governance, Risk & Compliance, hosted by Africa Legal in partnership with Afriwise, in Johannesburg on 7 October 2026.

You can find out more information here.

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