• Telecom engineer Zara Ahmed Sedick becomes the first woman to head Chad’s AI Directorate.

• The new body was created as part of the digital ministry’s recent restructuring.

• Her career includes roles at Ericsson, Huawei, and the Chadian presidency.

On October 24, the Chadian Ministry of Posts and Digital Economy officially appointed telecommunications engineer Zara Ahmed Sedick as head of the newly created Directorate General of Artificial Intelligence (DGIA).

The establishment of the DGIA is part of the ministry’s recent restructuring led by Minister Boukar Michel. According to a statement from the ministry, it “also reflects the political commitment of the President of the Republic, Head of State, Marshal Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno, as outlined in his five-year program.”

Zara Ahmed Sedick, the first woman to lead the DGIA, holds a degree in telecommunications engineering from the École Supérieure Privée d’Ingénierie et des Technologies (ESPRIT) in Tunisia and a specialized certificate in mobile radio network engineering from Paris Telecom.

She joined the Ministry of Posts and Digital Economy in 2024 as director of technology monitoring. Her professional career began in 2011 at Ericsson in Chad as a network optimization engineer. In 2015, she joined Huawei in the same country as a Node Package Manager (NPM) engineer.

In 2019, she was appointed technical adviser on Posts and Information and Communication Technologies at the Presidency of the Republic of Chad. The following year, she became director of control and inspection at the Chadian Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications and Posts, a position she held until 2024.