Pollicy and the Afro Feminist Data Futures programme (2021–ongoing)

The campaign anchored by Pollicy — the Kampala-headquartered Ugandan feminist collective of technologists, data scientists, creatives, and academics — is the corpus's clearest documented sustained African-feminist civil-society programme on data and AI governance. Its substantive register is the construction of an Afro-feminist methodological and conceptual infrastructure for analysing AI and data systems on the continent — one that begins from Black women's, feminist, queer, and decolonial African experience as the starting point rather than from imported Global North governance vocabularies — and the routing of that infrastructure into pan-African and international policy venues, capacity-building cohorts, and co-creation work with African governments and regional economic zones. It is the corpus's first sustained sub-Saharan African feminist-tech civil-society campaign on AI governance, the first multi-year programmatic Afro-feminist anchor on data-and-AI work, and the principal pan-African counterpart to the corpus's existing Latin American feminist-tech programmatic register at Coding Rights.

Origins: Pollicy's data-and-feminism mandate and the September 2021 launch

Pollicy was founded in 2016 by Neema Iyer in Kampala around the proposition that civic technology and government service delivery in Africa needed to be reshaped through better, more responsible, and more feminist data practice. The Afro Feminist Data Futures (AFDF) programme was launched in September 2021 as the organisation's headline body of programmatic work on data, gender, and — in the years that followed — AI from a sub-Saharan African feminist standpoint. The programme's launch convening was a 14 September 2021 webinar titled "Building feminist data futures" released in tandem with the Afro Feminist Data Futures Report, authored by Neema Iyer, Chenai Chair, and Garnett Achieng and published in English, French, and Portuguese to reach the breadth of the sub-Saharan African feminist field. Meta is named as a programme partner — a relationship the campaign treats as a partnership, not as the structural anchor of its theory of change, which runs through the African feminist field rather than through Big Tech.

The Afro Feminist Data Futures Report

The campaign's principal documentary anchor is the September 2021 Afro Feminist Data Futures Report. The report sets out how feminist movements in sub-Saharan Africa can be empowered through the production, sharing, and use of gender data, and frames the politics of the work around the proposition that "traditionally marginalised groups" should be "consulted and have a seat at the table" in data processes rather than being studied at distance. The report's three-language publication is itself part of the campaign's substantive register — Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone African feminist movements are treated as constituent rather than residual audiences, and the report's circulation across the three African linguistic spheres operates as the methodological refusal of an English-language default that the AFDF programme structurally encodes. The report is the corpus's clearest documented African-feminist primary statement of how gender data and feminist methodology should organise civil-society work on data and AI on the continent.

The 2022 Internet Governance Forum: Afro-feminist AI Governance enters the multilateral record

The campaign's first major routing of its register into a multilateral policy venue was Pollicy's convening of Workshop #439, "Afro-feminist AI Governance: Challenges and Lessons", at the 2022 Internet Governance Forum. The workshop panel — Kiito Shilongo (Research ICT Africa), Amber Sinha (Pollicy, Director of Research), Irene Mwendwa (Pollicy, Director of Strategic Initiatives), and Bobina Zulfa (Pollicy, Data and Digital Rights Researcher) — placed the under-representation of Black women in AI development and leadership, algorithmic bias against Black women in facial-recognition systems, and the need for African-feminist methodological infrastructure for AI governance into the IGF's official proceedings. The workshop cited the AFDF Report as supporting evidence and is the campaign's first multilateral-venue articulation of the Afro-feminist AI-governance framing the Towards Afro-feminist AI handbook would the following year develop into a sustained methodological document.

July 2023: the AFDF Festival and the Afro-Feminist Data Futures Manifesto

The 12-13 July 2023 Afro-Feminist Data Futures Festival at DataFest Africa is the campaign's largest single in-person convening to date. Twenty-five feminist activists, legal scholars, academics, and human-rights defenders from across Africa met to re-envision the future of data — including gender data, data governance, AI, and other emerging technologies — on the African continent from an Afro-feminist perspective. The convening's principal output is the Afro-Feminist Data Futures Manifesto, which translates the AFDF Report's Afro-feminist methodology into a manifesto register intended to shape conversations on African gender data and their influence on continental policy and system change. The manifesto is the campaign's primary collective-articulation artefact — a document produced not by Pollicy alone but by a pan-African feminist cohort and signed off as the field's joint statement of methodology — and the festival itself is the campaign's primary in-person register for sustaining the cohort of African feminist researchers and organisers the AFDF programme convenes around.

October 2023: Towards Afro-feminist AI and the Principles of Afro-feminist AI Data

The campaign's intellectual core is the October 2023 publication of Towards Afro-feminist AI: A Handbook for approaching Governance of AI in Africa, authored by Amber Sinha and Bobina Zulfa, with the companion Principles of Afro-feminist AI Data. The handbook's anchor framing is that "AI is located very much within, reinforces and often amplifies the old gendered and racial structures of power" and that any African AI governance worth the name must therefore begin from Black women's experiences rather than from imported governance vocabularies; the handbook centres agency, human dignity, privacy, and non-discrimination as the governance values that an Afro-feminist approach to AI in Africa should run on. Within the corpus, the handbook is the African-feminist methodological counterpart to Coding Rights's Oppressive A.I. — both publications develop feminist analytical categories for reading AI systems as questions of political power and not solely of accuracy or fairness, anchored in their respective Global South geographies and feminist traditions. The pairing of the handbook and the Principles of Afro-feminist AI Data is the campaign's principal piece of methodological infrastructure for downstream Afro-feminist civil-society and academic work; the two documents are now hosted alongside one another on MERL Tech's resource library as the field's African-feminist contribution to the wider monitoring, evaluation, research and learning infrastructure for AI work.

The Afro-Feminist Data Governance project: co-creation across four countries

Alongside the report-and-handbook documentary axis, the campaign runs a co-creation methodology across Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia under the Afro-Feminist Data Governance project — engaging governments, civil-society organisations, and regional economic zones in joint development of data-governance frameworks that begin from Afro-feminist methodology rather than treating it as a downstream consultation step. The four-country scope spans both Anglophone and Francophone West African and East and Southern African governance contexts, and the co-creation register places the campaign in direct working contact with national-level policy infrastructure in a way distinct from the multilateral IGF and continental DataFest convening register. The project is the campaign's clearest operational extension of the AFDF Report's "consulted and at the table" methodological proposition into actual co-creation work with African public-sector and civil-society partners.

Reception and adjacent academic engagement

The campaign's methodological outputs have been picked up across the adjacent academic and applied-research field. The Afro-feminist methodology is engaged in the Oxford Science and Public Policy article "Foundations for African feminism as an ethics for artificial intelligence", which draws the Afro-feminist register into peer-reviewed AI-ethics scholarship. The handbook and Principles documents are hosted by MERL Tech alongside their companion artefacts as field-deployable resources, and Pollicy's IGF 2022 workshop is in the Internet Governance Forum's official record. The campaign's reception across these registers — multilateral policy, academic publication, and applied resource library — is the corpus's clearest documented case of an African-feminist AI-governance methodology entering the wider AI-governance field on its own terms, rather than as an addendum to a Global North governance vocabulary.

Significance for the broader AI-good movement

The campaign is the corpus's principal mapped instance of grassroots-civil-society Afro-feminist organising on AI governance — the African counterpart to Coding Rights's Latin American feminist-tech programmatic register and the methodological complement to Paradigm Initiative's West-African and pan-African digital-rights and digital-inclusion convening register. Its theory of change runs through methodological and conceptual infrastructure rather than through litigation or single-policy-target advocacy: the AFDF Report, the AFDF Manifesto, the Towards Afro-feminist AI handbook, and the Principles of Afro-feminist AI Data together constitute the field's principal Afro-feminist analytical apparatus, and the IGF workshop, AFDF Festival, and Afro-Feminist Data Governance four-country co-creation work route that apparatus into multilateral, continental, and national-level policy venues. The campaign's substantive contribution to the make-AI-good movement, distinct from the corpus's other regional anchors, is the operationalised African-feminist civic-tech methodology — refusing the separation between AI policy advocacy, gender-and-tech research, and the imaginative work of figuring out what better African technological futures might look like, and routing that refusal through Ugandan and pan-African feminist, queer, and decolonial traditions rather than through imported Global North digital-rights vocabularies. It is the corpus's first multi-year programmatic Afro-feminist civil-society campaign on data and AI governance and the principal sub-Saharan African feminist-tech anchor on the campaign side of the corpus's regional shape.