How do African women’s experiences show us that AI and data governance must be imagined and built differently? What changes when we center the perspectives of local technologists, tech workers, civil society actors, and communities living with the shared reality of exploitation in global technological systems?

As AI systems and data infrastructures become increasingly entwined with political and economic life on the continent, what do they reveal about exploitation, agency, and power—and why must we pay particular attention to their gendered dynamics?

This conversation brings together Kenyan lawyer and tech policy advocate Irene Mwendwa and African feminist scholar Ololade Faniyi to explore how African feminist principles of autonomy, care, and accountability can reshape how we think about AI and data governance.

Together, they ask:

  • How can African feminisms enrich and transform critical technology studies?
  • In what ways does the digital age reshape our encounters with the world as feminist humans?
  • How might African feminist thought redefine sovereignty, disrupting how dehumanization has long been encoded in Africa’s relation to global empires of AI and data?

Join us for an important discussion at the intersection of AI, gender, and African feminist thought—one that challenges dominant narratives and opens new pathways for reimagining technological governance.

Date:     Thursday, 13 November 2025
Time:     15:00-16:00 SAST
Venue:   Online via MS Teams 
 

Meet Our Speakers:

Ololade Faniyi is an African feminist interdisciplinary scholar whose research explores the relationship between critical technology studies and African feminisms, with a focus on how Afro-feminist thought reimagines technology beyond Western and Chinese dominance. She is the Gender and Feminisms editor at the pan-African platform The Republic, a graduate fellow with the Atlanta Interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence (AIAI) Network, and Co-Director of the Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education Fellowship.

Irene Mwendwa is a lawyer working to create safer digital futures through research and advocacy in technology policy and data governance. She has led innovative collaborations across public, private, and civil society sectors, shaping projects that strengthen legal and policy frameworks on issues such as elections and technology. Irene’s work is guided by a commitment to integrity, imagination, and justice, and by a vision of building liberatory futures