An African feminist liberatory approach recognizes technology as inherently political rather than neutral. Rather than accepting these embedded politics as inevitable, a liberatory approach would make them explicit and subject to democratic deliberation.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, an African feminist liberatory approach offers a fundamentally different vision of technological progress—one measured not by profit or computational capacity but by how technology contributes to the collective. In contrast to the Techno-Optimist Manifesto’s individualistic vision, African feminist epistemologies offer frameworks for understanding technology as inherently relational.
Liberatory AI infrastructure is not merely theoretical—it is already emerging through the concrete actions of African feminists and technologists who are transforming how AI is governed, developed, and deployed.
Kauna Malgwi’s testimony about content moderation conditions has had far-reaching impacts beyond Africa’s borders. Her advocacy helped lead to the European Union passing a directive protecting platform workers, demonstrating how the labor organizing of African women can reshape global technology governance. This cross-border influence reveals how African feminist resistance to exploitative tech practices creates ripple effects that benefit workers worldwide, fundamentally changing the narrative about whose imaginary can be embedded in policy and architecture of technology.
African women technologists are also directly shaping policy at national and regional levels. The expertise and advocacy of women like Dr Chinasa Okolo and more have contributed significantly to both Nigeria’s national AI strategy and the African Union’s continental approach. Rather than passively adapting to regulatory frameworks imported from the West or East, these women are ensuring that African priorities and values are centered on policy development.
Grassroots education initiatives are equally crucial in building liberatory infrastructure. My moderation of the Liberation Alliance teach-in on digital colonialism and Afro-feminist futures exemplifies how feminist collectives are contributing to citizen education and consciousness-raising. These spaces create critical literacy around technological systems, enabling communities to engage with technology from a position of knowledge rather than dependence.
Legal action and public accountability represent another scale of this emerging infrastructure. Former content moderators are seeking justice through lawsuits and public shaming of exploitative tech companies. These actions challenge the impunity with which multinational corporations have operated in African contexts, forcing recognition of their responsibilities toward African workers and users.
When viewed collectively, these initiatives constitute a distinct form of techno-resistance that recenters African women in who gets to talk about, critique, and rebuild technology. This resistance operates across multiple scales—from individual content moderators organizing for better working conditions to policy advocates shaping continental strategies.
We also see possibilities contained in community-led AI projects that demonstrate alternative approaches to technological development. Charity Wayua’s AI tool for identifying cassava diseases shows how AI can address challenges specific to African agricultural contexts, especially how artificial intelligence can be developed specifically to address local needs and improve livelihoods when designed with and for communities.
Projects like Ijemma Onwuzulike’s IgboSpeech, the first Igbo voice-to-text AI model, exemplify liberatory AI in action. By building technological infrastructure for the Igbo language—creating not just a speech recognition system but a foundational API with over 5,000 words, nearly 30,000 Igbo sentences, and thousands of audio recordings—Onwuzulike demonstrates how AI can preserve and amplify indigenous languages, creating the technological foundation that would enable platforms like Duolingo to incorporate Igbo language learning. The Zambian feminist collective, Sistah Sistah, also launched their Feminist Ethics AI toolkit in 2024, offering developers a review list to gauge their products’ communal suitability. While still operating on the margins of mainstream technological development, these projects demonstrate tangible and possible futures of liberation.
What unites these diverse initiatives is their recognition of Africans—and particularly African women—not merely as consumers or low-skilled laborers in global technology supply chains, but as essential knowledge producers and innovators. By centering the experiences, needs, and expertise of those historically marginalized in technological development, these initiatives are reimagining the material conditions of technology – reimagining not just who benefits from AI but who creates it and for what purpose. By pushing against the false binary between the uncritical adoption of exploitative technologies and the rejection of technological development altogether, they create a third path: critical engagement that transforms technology to serve liberation.
The future of liberatory AI does not lie with amoral Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or Chinese state-affiliated corporations, but with the grassroots innovators, policy advocates, labor organizers, and community educators who are already building alternative technological infrastructures. Their work shows us that different technological futures are not only possible but already emerging.
