Youth Frontier Technologies and African Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience Management

Abstract

Climate-induced environmental crises in Sub-Saharan Africa present escalating threats that top-down, Westerncentric technological
models frequently fail to mitigate due to a fundamental disconnect from local socio-cultural realities. This article examines the operational convergence of youth-led frontier technologies, specifically Artificial Intelligence (AI), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Large Language Models (LLMs), with African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS) in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and resilience management. Framed within the philosophical tenets of Ubuntu and the "Brain Re-Engineering and Reimagination" framework, this study investigated how digital-native youth act as epistemic bridges, translating African indigenous and local ecological indicators into actionable digital frameworks. Employing a qualitative comparative case study design across Zimbabwe, Malawi, and South Africa, the research evaluated localized, hybrid early warning and adaptation infrastructures. The empirical results reveal that integrating localized ancestral environmental indicators with satellite-driven computational models can optimize disaster intervention efficacy by up to 30% in underserved regions, correcting systematic data omissions that characterize global Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. However, structural barriers like "disaster linguicism" and extractive data pipelines continue to replicate patterns of digital colonialism. The article concludes by outlining a strategic roadmap for localized data sovereignty and a Pan-African AI Sovereignty framework to protect epistemic autonomy.