Most of the world's AI is built far from the people it affects. The A+ Alliance exists to change who builds. Co-founded by Women at the Table with Ciudadanía Inteligente and now co-led with Code for Africa, it is a global coalition building feminist AI from the ground up: tools prototyped and owned by the communities that need them, not adapted from systems designed elsewhere.
Where our multilateral and procurement work shapes the rules at the top, the A+ Alliance builds at the base, the same agenda from opposite ends. Our fa+ir methodology, feminist AI by design, validated over three years across Latin America, MENA, and Asia, anchors two programmes.
Gender & AI Innovation Collective
AI development in Africa has been shaped by outside actors and commercial interests, leaving the communities that understand local problems best without the means to build their own solutions. The Gender & AI Innovation Collective flips that.
With Code for Africa and support from IDRC and FCDO through the AI4D network, we work with women’s rights organisations over 18 months to prototype, localise, and pilot AI systems they have defined themselves, co-created, and community-owned.
The demand is the proof. More than 550 organisations applied; 107 joined the first cohort and 110 the second. Women’s rights groups want to control their own future and build the tools their communities need, and the readiness runs far deeper than anyone assumes.
The work is already moving from training to product. The first prototype, developed with a consortium of women’s rights lawyers in Nigeria, eases the evidentiary pipeline and strengthens the prosecution of technology-facilitated gender-based violence. Throughout, the Collective grows local capacity and links African innovators to peers across Latin America, MENA, and Asia.
Feminist Forensics
When Ethiopian Mayor Adanech Abiebie woke to find her face on AI-generated intimate videos viewed 562,000 times within hours, she was not the victim of an isolated incident. She was targeted by organised crime. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence runs as a criminal enterprise across borders, sharing the platforms, payment systems, and playbooks that also drive political deepfakes, blackmail, and coordinated trolling. It is transnational, adaptive, and automated. Feminist movements, meanwhile, see only fragments and respond incident by incident, with tools they cannot afford to maintain.
The threat is already operational. Our response is being built to meet it. Feminist Forensics is the blueprint for the world’s first feminist-led technical defence network: a Digital Guardian Network, beginning in Africa, that will turn frontline feminists into forensic investigators who dismantle the infrastructure of abuse rather than only document it. A four-stage pathway, Defenders, Advocates, Builders, Mentors, is designed to carry movements from self-defence to building their own tools and training others.
At its heart is data gathered by women’s rights organisations in their own languages, work that does triple duty: expanding a language base blind to gender-responsive idiom, keeping the data in community hands, and enriching what the whole field can draw on. That data will feed a planned Feminist AI Sandbox of shared models and local-language resources that catch weaponised terms dominant-language systems miss, to be tested across nine hub countries chosen for the hardest environments.
→ Our goal: within three years, more than 60 organisations operating as one cyber-defence network, cutting online violence in target communities by a quarter, tracing the payment flows and shared infrastructure that make these operations profitable, and turning that intelligence into evidence, precedent, and policy.
The same AI weaponised against women can be reclaimed as feminist defence, and the communities cast as subjects of AI can become its authors. Across both programmes, the A+ Alliance ensures feminist movements don’t merely survive the digital future. They build it.