I
A royalty that could not travel
The story starts with books. Around 2021, Samuel saw that African authors, writers in Uganda among them, had no easy way to self-publish and be paid for their work. The big platforms wanted a US bank account, or a third party whose fees left the author with, in his word, peanuts.
So he built Eboore, a publishing and commerce platform for African stories, with payments that fit the places its authors and readers live, mobile money included. The writing already existed. What was missing was an arrangement that let it reach readers and pay the people who wrote it.
The talent was never the gap. The arrangements around it were.
II
Opening doors
Once he had seen that pattern, he kept finding it. Fellowships, grants and programmes change careers, yet finding them often depends on knowing where to look. OpenFellowships gathers them in one open place.
CentPol came next: a technology policy community that looks at AI governance from African and emerging-market perspectives, rather than assuming the view from Washington or Brussels is the whole picture. He also writes The Policy Brief.
III
Learning how power works
Alongside the building, he studied the other side of the problem. He earned a master’s in national security policy at RAND, worked on science policy at the American Physical Society, and was selected for the 2025 NSPN Science Diplomacy Fellowship. He also took part in Perplexity’s AI Business Fellowship.
His research follows power through technology: AI-enabled disinformation, algorithmic manipulation, cognitive warfare, and the concentration of power through AI systems. It is the same question at a larger scale.
Who sets the terms, and who has to live with them?
IV
Why AIGovSpec
Software taught him that systems do what their arrangements reward. Policy taught him that a rule matters only if someone can act on it. AIGovSpec joins the two: a framework that starts from the arrangements around AI (its incentives, institutions, infrastructures and safeguards) and GovSpec, a tool that turns policy text into controls people can review.
He describes himself as an outlet: someone who carries ideas into the world. AIGovSpec is that idea in practice. It is one definition, offered openly and built to be questioned.