Afriwise: Pioneering Legal Intelligence in Africa With Steven De Backer at the Helm

Navigating Africa’s complex legal landscape with confidence and clarity, Steven De Backer is the brain behind Afriwise, a pioneering legal intelligence platform transforming the African legal landscape. With a rich background in law and technology, Steven’s journey spans continents and industries, from launching Belgium’s first online trading platform to practicing corporate law across Africa. His experiences inspired Afriwise, a unique platform that offers reliable, up-to-date legal information across the continent. Steven aims to bridge the knowledge gap, empowering businesses and professionals to navigate African laws with confidence.

Steven’s Journey to Establishing Afriwise

Steven grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo and studied law in Belgium. He started his career in tech and data, launching Belgium’s first online trading platform. Soon, he found his passion in the legal world, particularly in Africa. He practiced law at Freshfields in Brussels before returning to Africa in 2003. Over two decades, Steven worked to improve legal services across the continent, establishing networks of associated law firms and founding an interdisciplinary advisory firm.

Founded in 2018, Afriwise is the culmination of his journey – a platform designed to turn legal uncertainty into strategic clarity, empowering organisations to navigate Africa’s complexity with confidence while reshaping outdated, inefficient approaches to legal and regulatory access.

Afriwise: Transforming Legal Intelligence

Afriwise is an award-winning legal intelligence platform that democratizes access to legal and regulatory information across Africa. It resolves the challenge of unreliable and outdated legal information through advanced technology with deep human expertise.

Afriwise collaborates with over 180 leading law firms to ensure its content is accurate, locally relevant, and continuously updated. The platform offers a comprehensive legal database, regulatory monitoring, and horizon scanning, while also contextualising and explaining laws to help users act with confidence. With coverage spanning 40+ countries and expanding, Afriwise is a trusted partner for global companies entering new markets and local businesses managing complex compliance requirements.

Returning to the African Legal Landscape: The Key Inspiration

Steven’s decision to return to the African legal landscape stemmed from a deep connection to the continent and a clear understanding of its challenges. While practising law across Africa, he consistently encountered the same issue: businesses lacked access to reliable, up-to-date legal information. Laws were often difficult to find, frameworks varied widely, and regulatory developments were hard to track. Recognising how much this uncertainty held organisations back, he saw an opportunity to make a lasting impact. Afriwise emerged from that vision as a platform designed to remove friction from doing business in Africa by making legal knowledge structured, accessible and actionable at scale.

Steven’s Personal Connection to the Mission

Steven’s 30 years of experience living and working in Africa have profoundly shaped the company’s mission. His on-the-ground experience in countries like the DRC, Tanzania, Burundi, and South Africa taught him the importance of respecting all differences while connecting the whole. This insight led to Afriwise being built with pan-African scope and deeply local content. Steven’s connection to the continent makes Afriwise’s mission personal, driven by a desire to give back and empower the next generation to navigate African legal landscapes more easily.

Overcoming the Challenges

Steven and his team faced significant challenges in building and scaling their platform across dozens of jurisdictions. The complexity and diversity of legal environments, the lack of transparency, and outdated systems posed hurdles. To overcome these, Afriwise worked closely with in-country law firms, standardized content formats, and invested in quality control. Building trust was also crucial, achieved through accuracy, timeliness, and a user-centric approach. Strategic acquisitions, such as legally focused LLM and NLP development companies, helped scale the technology efficiently.

A Distinctive Collaborative Approach 

Afriwise’s success is built on a trusted network of in-country legal experts spanning 180 top law firms, working with us to deliver accurate, up-to-date legal intelligence. These firms are not just contributors but partners, actively involved in shaping and validating the platform’s content. Afriwise provides clear editorial guidelines, structured templates and a standardised framework to ensure consistency across jurisdictions.

Ongoing communication, regular check-ins, and shared feedback keep everyone aligned, while joint events help reinforce a sense of community and shared purpose. This model goes beyond coordination. It is a collaborative effort where local legal experts and Afriwise co-create content that reflects both depth and practical relevance. The result is a platform strengthened by partnership, trusted for its quality, and respected for its authenticity.

Strategies for Maintaining Agility and Innovation

Steven maintains agility and innovation through a combination of strategies. Afriwise keeps its team lean and cross-functional, allowing for quick movements and rapid releases. The company prioritises client-centricity, building solutions based on user needs and pain points. A culture of experimentation and bold moves, such as strategic acquisitions, enhances its capabilities. The team’s diversity, reflecting both global and African perspectives, ensures solutions meet the needs of its diverse customer base. By empowering team members to act fast and take ownership of their ideas, Afriwise stays ahead with speed, soul, and conviction.

What Makes Afriwise Stand Out?

Afriwise stands out due to its combination of breadth, depth, and trust. Beyond providing access to laws, it offers expert commentary, practical guides, and actionable workflows. The platform’s collaborative model ensures high-quality, locally relevant content, while AI enhances search, analysis, and usability. Afriwise evolves based on user needs and legal developments, making it a trusted, intuitive platform for informed decision-making.

Ensuring Accuracy and Relevance

Afriwise’s content is kept updated and accurate through a human-in-the-loop model. Partner law firms monitor developments in their jurisdictions and provide regular updates, which are then verified and processed by an in-house team. Technology, such as AI-powered tools, accelerates the detection of changes, but local lawyers validate every update to ensure accuracy and relevance. Every legal update on Afriwise is human-verified, lawyer-reviewed, and tech-accelerated.

Harnessing AI and Machine Learning

Afriwise uses AI and machine learning to transform fragmented legal texts into structured, machine-readable formats. Through a focus on data quality and natural language processing, the platform ensures that its legal insights are built on accurate, context-rich information. The acquisition of Pythagoria strengthened this capability, enabling the automation of legislative text structuring at scale. This focus not only improves current legal workflows but also sets the stage for broader AI-driven innovation across Africa’s legal landscape.

The Vision for Afriwise: Over the Next Five Years

Afriwise is evolving beyond legal research into real-time decision-making, automated compliance, and risk intelligence. The platform focuses on engineering the infrastructure for smart businesses, utilizing structured legal and AI-driven tools. Afriwise plans to scale with purpose, targeting full continental coverage in Africa and setting the global standards for legal intelligence in emerging markets. The ultimate goal for Afriwise is to be an integral part of the operating system for doing business in Africa, making legal compliance a competitive edge.

Business Transformation: At the Intersection of Law, Technology, and Expertise

It’s a game-changer. Making legal information accessible and actionable empowers businesses to operate more confidently and efficiently. It is also creates opportunities for collaboration, innovation, and even better governance. Law, tech, and local expertise together are building a more transparent, dynamic business environment across the continent.

Steven’s Legacy in African Legal-Tech

Steven hopes to catalyse a fundamental shift in the African legal landscape, from fragmented legal systems to a data-driven approach to law, risk management, and compliance, where insight is structured, predictive, and actionable. His vision is for lawyers, businesses, and regulators to operate with clarity, speed, and confidence, no longer held back by legal uncertainty. Steven also aims to inspire the next generation of legal innovators, blending deep legal expertise with technology to redefine how legal intelligence is created, shared, and used in emerging markets.

Future Outlook: Expanding Legal Intelligence

Afriwise is committed to expanding its coverage across Africa, including Francophone, Lusophone, and North African jurisdictions. A significant step was taken in February 2025 with a partnership with Droit-Afrique, integrating their extensive repository of laws, codes, and decrees from 19 Francophone African countries into the Afriwise platform. This collaboration provides bilingual access, consolidated laws, real-time updates, and intuitive search functionality, enhancing the commitment to delivering unparalleled legal research capabilities across the continent.