Description:

In today’s data-driven world, the existence of subsisting and emerging technologies and their accompanying challenges to human rights and inclusion require in-depth, critical analysis. Growingly apparent, while posing risks to the general population, these challenges are also disproportionately damaging to minority and vulnerable populations. Understanding these risks and their impact has spurred efforts to develop and build frameworks shaping the creation of Artificial Intelligence globally. However, globally, these efforts have been led and shaped by values and stakeholders from the Global North, to the exclusion of the Global South even as adoption of these technologies continues to grow in the region, a gap reflecting biases and providing an insightful illustration into the problem of AI integration and deployment today. Appropriately and adequately regulating the use of these technologies in Africa, with its unique history and culture, therefore requires the development of Afro-centric frameworks involving African stakeholders with an understanding of the relevant issues. This aligns with the goals and objectives at Pollicy, Research ICT Africa, The Future Society (TFS) and the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) to contribute and shape some of the incredible research emerging in this space on the African continent. Part of this includes developing an Afro-feminist AI Governance framework leveraging our past and growing experience and research. The framework will be developed with an eye for technologists, members of civil society and policymakers, highlighting some of the trends in the growing development of AI in Africa, the gaps in other frameworks and novel insight for significant markers and landmarks to take note of in AI development. This is in line with Research ICT Africa’s ongoing work under the Africa Just AI Policy Centre, which is a public-interest research centre investigating the contextually fitting AI governance frameworks for African countries. Similar to Pollicy, this research also applies a gender lens to its analysis. This research also supports the public policy and government advisory work at TBI where we are supporting governments with technology policy development through a workstream on AI governance and policy. In addition, TFS works to support national AI strategies in Africa in AI Policies we developed in Rwanda, Ghana and Tunisia. An early iteration of the Afro-feminist AI Governance framework, which will be collaboratively developed, will be presented and launched during our annual DataFest in July 2022. Feedback from participants during this event will be noted and further used to strengthen the framework, which will then be launched at our session during the Deep Learning Indaba Conference in August in Tunis in conjunction with the Tony Blair Institute. Following this launch, our goal for this workshop is to share some of the on-going challenges, and lessons involved in this process as part of our goal to demystify and make governance and policymaking accessible.