South Korea Governor of Chungcheongnam-do Province visits the AI Hub for Sustainable Development in Rome

Exploring public-private partnerships for sustainable AI to support human-centric innovation

Rome, 27 August 2026 - Today, Governor Park Soo-hyun of Chungcheongnam-do Province, Republic of Korea, visited the AI Hub for Sustainable Development in Rome, as one stop in a broader mission to Italy. The visit follows a formal request from the Province, referred to as the AI capital of Korea, to learn more about the AI Hub's model for public-private partnerships in applying AI to sustainable development.

It comes at a moment of renewed momentum in the Italy-Korea relationship. In June 2026, President Lee Jae-myung and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni elevated bilateral ties to a Special Strategic Partnership and adopted a 2026-2030 Strategic Action Plan that places artificial intelligence and high-tech cooperation at its centre.

The AI Hub for Sustainable Development is a G7-endorsed initiative co-led by the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy (MIMIT) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), launched in 2025 following Italy's G7 Presidency. It brings committed G7 and African industrial partners together around concrete AI applications, from agriculture to education, language and voice technology, and data centres. Two features distinguish the AI Hub's partnership model: it convenes founders, industry, and public institutions to build together. And it holds dedicated programmatic funding to co-invest with partners in Africa, so that collaboration moves from dialogue to diffusion.

The AI Hub's partnership model builds on the broader work advanced during Italy's G7 Presidency in 2024. This included "Growing Together: Building Public-Private Partnerships to Boost the AI Revolution," a G7 conference convened at INNOVIT in San Francisco in November 2024 under the leadership of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI). The question then, as now, was who actually gets AI into people's hands and builds the capacity, infrastructure, and markets around it. Not governments alone, not UNDP alone, and not traditional aid alone. The private sector had to be at the center: African builders who understand the problem, and global partners with the tools and market reach to solve it at scale.

The Governor was received by Federico Eichberg, Head of Cabinet, Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy (MIMIT), Counsellor of Embassy Sergio Strozzi, Head of Office IV - Promotion of Innovative Industrial Supply Chains and Start-ups, Directorate General for Growth and Export Promotion (DGCE), at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, and Counsellor Fabio Massimo Ballerini, Adviser on the Mattei Plan for Africa at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers; alongside Keyzom Ngodup Massally, Director of the AI Hub for Sustainable Development and Global Head of Digital & AI Programmes at UNDP, Duccio Tenti, Head of Strategy and Partnerships at the UNDP in Italy, and Maria Giulia Vitagliano, Head of Strategic Engagement at the AI Hub for Sustainable Development at UNDP.

Participants also included representatives from the European Commission Representation in Italy, FAO Office of Innovation, Terna, Cyber 4.0, Harmonic Innovation Group / Entopan, and LUISS University.

"The Special Strategic Partnership between Italy and the Republic of Korea places artificial intelligence at its centre, and exchanges like this one, at the level of practice rather than declaration, are how that cooperation becomes concrete," said Federico Eichberg. "What we hope to foster with Governor Park and his delegation is not the presentation of a one-size-fits-all model, but an open exchange on the approaches that have delivered results, the lessons learned, and the conditions that enable public-private cooperation to work in practice." The government of Italy highlighted its Italy-Africa Mattei Plan, emphasizing the cornerstones of small and medium enterprises, youth-led AI innovations, and international cooperation as common areas of global leadership with South Korea.

Industrial partners of the AI Hub presented their collaboration with African counterparts. Francesco Cicione, founder of Harmonic Innovation Group, outlined a human-centred approach to AI in which ethical and value-based considerations are embedded directly within the reasoning process rather than applied afterwards as external safeguards. Drawing connections between Mediterranean humanism and Korean and broader East Asian traditions, he emphasised that questions concerning the human implications of AI transcend individual regions and cultures.

DeepLeaf, a Moroccan startup applying AI to crop health and food security, and Cyber 4.0, through its Cyber4Africa programme, illustrated the AI Hub's work on AI diffusion pathways: reusable routes that capture how a proven AI application reaches widespread adoption, so that each new adopter can build on what already works rather than starting from zero. DeepLeaf opened its foundational model so that local founders across the continent can build tools suited to their own crops and countries, turning a single product into shared infrastructure that now reaches millions of farmers with timely, trusted crop advice.

Cyber 4.0 strengthens the trust layer that makes such adoption durable, equipping African startups to build strong cybersecurity into their systems from the start, so that AI can scale without eroding the confidence of the communities it serves. Terna highlighted its collaboration with NextAV, a Tunisian innovator participating in the AI Hub's Compute Accelerator under the Compute Ready Track and in the Global Scaleup Program of Terna Innovation Zone Tunisia. NextAV applies AI-powered super-resolution to public satellite imagery for energy, climate and infrastructure monitoring. Building on this work, Terna is conducting a proof of concept with NextAV to test AI-based enhancement of satellite imagery for infrastructure design and monitoring, based on a Terna use case.

"Better models do not automatically produce better outcomes. Someone still has to make AI work in the real world," said Keyzom Ngodup Massally, Director, AI Hub for Sustainable Development, UNDP. "Time and again, when industry innovates and builds alongside governments and communities, what emerges works for more people, in more contexts. AI can be the great equaliser, if we choose diffusion."

Governor Park Soo-hyun highlighted Chungcheongnam-do's distinctive approach to AI transformation, noting that while AI transformation has been included in the recent election pledges of Korea's metropolitan and provincial governments, most have focused primarily on industrial development. "Chungcheongnam-do, however, has taken a different approach. We believe that if we do not pay close attention to the impact of AI on people, the gap between industry and people will widen in the digital era. That is why Chungcheongnam-do has placed the balance between people and AI at the centre of its AI policy commitments," he said. He further emphasized that Chungcheongnam-do is one of the Korean local governments whose vision and direction are aligned with those of the UNDP AI Hub for Sustainable Development.

Governor Park also expressed his strong interest in building a close partnership with the AI Hub for Sustainable Development, saying that Chungcheongnam-do hopes to continue discussions toward establishing a formal partnership, including the possibility of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), and to develop concrete areas of cooperation going forward.

The AI Hub for Sustainable Development welcomes visits from governments and institutions seeking to understand its model, as one reference point among several for how public and private actors can collaborate on AI.

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