Africa Leading AI Innovation

The vision

For too long, African communities have been subjects of AI systems designed elsewhere. The African AI & Equality Toolbox flips this dynamic, placing African stakeholders, from policymakers, technologists, civil society, and communities, at the center of AI innovation that serves their needs and reflects their values.

What makes it powerful

Developed by Women at the Table and the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), adapted from our collaboration with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), this is an African-led framework built for African contexts.

The Toolbox’s strength lies in detailed, African-conceived case studies across five strategic sectors:

• Agriculture: Women farmers co-design AI systems that address their actual challenges: soil health degradation, pest management, and direct market access. Farmers control the data, shape the algorithms, and determine priorities, ensuring solutions serve community needs.
• Health: AI-powered malaria diagnostics for rural Uganda prioritize equitable deployment from the start: addressing access, data protection, affordability, and sustainability while keeping health workers central to care delivery.
• Climate: Community-driven environmental sensing enables citizens to monitor air and noise pollution in urban and rural areas. Communities deploy sensors, interpret data, and use evidence for accountability and action.
• Education & Language: Natural language processing for underserved African languages and Kenyan Sign Language translation is built by and with the communities who use these languages, ensuring technology serves linguistic diversity rather than constraining it.
• Digital Safety: AI systems detect coordinated technology-facilitated gender-based violence, identify harassment patterns, protect vulnerable users, and enable platform accountability—proactive defense rather than reactive moderation.

Each case study applies a Human Rights-based AI Lifecycle Framework based on the Council of Europe’s HUDERIA (Human Dignity Impact Assessment), rooted in feminist, decolonial, and JEDI principles.

The impact

The Toolbox builds permanent African capacity in AI governance, creates interdisciplinary networks that strengthen the ecosystem, and ensures AI development advances rights, dignity, and locally-defined priorities. Published in September 2025 as a living document, it positions African expertise at the forefront of global AI development, not as participants in conversations led elsewhere, but as architects of the frameworks shaping technology’s future.