African Feminist Interventions in AI Ethics

Africa continues to appear in global AI ethics conversations as a site of concern, intervention, or application, rather than as a source of conceptual and political critique. In this webinar, Ololade Faniyi and Irene Mwendwa offered more than a discussion of gender and technology in African contexts. They staged a deliberate refusal of a familiar script in global AI ethics—Africa as a site of impact, harm, or application. Instead, they worked to reposition African feminist thought and practice as a source of critique, imagination, and alternative political horizons for AI and data governance.

Ololade Faniyi’s contribution set the conceptual tone. The intervention began by naming Africa’s structural location in global technological systems—marked by extraction, labour exploitation, and epistemic marginalisation—and then moved beyond this framing. Rather than allowing harm to become the primary register through which Africa is made intelligible, it was used as a diagnostic for exposing the limits of dominant AI imaginaries. The central provocation was not simply that AI systems harm African women, but that prevailing global approaches to AI governance are built on assumptions about value, progress, and universality that systematically exclude African visions of technology.

Crucially, African feminism was framed not as an identity-based perspective to be added to AI ethics, but as a method of political and epistemic reorientation. When the question of an “African vision of technology” was posed, it was not a call for cultural authenticity or regional variation. Instead, it was a challenge to why African social worlds are so often absent from the design, governance, and imagination of technological futures—except as markets, datasets, or labour pools. In this way, Africa appeared as a standpoint from which the inadequacy of global AI ethics frameworks becomes visible.

Irene Mwendwa’s intervention complemented and grounded this critique through practice. While acknowledging the very real harms African women experience in digital spaces—from surveillance to online violence—the contribution resisted a framing that reduces African women to victims of technology. Drawing on examples from feminist organising, digital community-building, and everyday online practices, Mwendwa’s intervention foregrounded agency, creativity, and care as central features of African women’s engagement with digital systems.

One of the most generative contributions lay in the insistence on joy, memory, and relationality as political resources. Through reflections on digital archives, shared stories, and community practices, technology was reframed as a terrain of social life where alternative values are already being enacted. This orientation subtly but powerfully challenged dominant AI ethics debates, which often privilege regulation and compliance while overlooking how people actively remake technologies in use.

Together, Ololade Faniyi and Irene Mwendwa offered a compelling account of sovereignty that extends beyond ownership or control of data. Sovereignty emerged as a question of who gets to imagine, define, and sustain technological futures, and under what ethical commitments. Care, accountability, and relational responsibility appeared as organising principles that stand in tension with extractive, profit-driven models of AI development.

Importantly, both speakers did not present African feminism as a finished solution to the problems of AI governance. Instead, it functioned as a provocation and an invitation, resisting the expectation that Africa must produce neat alternatives to global systems it did not design. Rather than offering blueprints, both speakers offered tools: ways of seeing, questioning, and refusing dominant narratives about AI inevitability, neutrality, and progress.

Another key insight generated by the conversation was methodological in the sense of demonstrating a non-linear movement between theory and practice. Practice did not simply apply theory, nor did theory merely interpret practice. Instead, African feminist thought emerged through practice and reflection, with practice itself operating as critique.

A productive tension nevertheless remains around the conditions under which African perspectives become legible in global AI ethics debates. The conversation suggested that naming harm often functions as an entry point, even when the work being done reaches well beyond documentation of injury. In this regard, what Ololade Faniyi and Irene Mwendwa modelled was not a retreat from harm, but a refusal to let it determine the horizon of ethical thought. In doing so, the discussion gestured toward an AI ethics attentive to African feminist insight as a mode of critique, imagination, and ethical worldmaking.

In centring African feminism as a force of critique, the conversation opened a different way of thinking about AI ethics, one that does not begin from inclusion alone or conclude with governance fixes. Instead, it suggested that ethical reflection might take African feminist insight seriously as a generative standpoint capable of reshaping how technological futures are imagined, contested, and sustained. Put simply, what remains is a question directed at the field itself. Is global AI ethics is prepared to engage Africa as a source of conceptual and political thought?