Pollicy Afro Feminist Data Futures programme launch — "Building feminist data futures" webinar and report release (14 September 2021)

On 14 September 2021 the Kampala-anchored Ugandan feminist collective Pollicy publicly launched its Afro Feminist Data Futures (AFDF) programme through a virtual webinar titled "Building feminist data futures" and the simultaneous public release of the Afro Feminist Data Futures Report in English, French, and Portuguese. The launch made public the substantive output of months of feminist-research run-up — the programme had been listed on Pollicy's project archive from August 2021 and had been previewed in an April 2021 preview webinar with the authors of Data Feminism — and seeded the sustained multi-year Afro Feminist Data Futures campaign that the corpus now carries as its principal African-feminist civil-society anchor on data and AI governance.

What was launched on 14 September 2021

Two connected artefacts went on the public record on 14 September 2021. The first was the Afro Feminist Data Futures Report itself, authored by Neema Iyer, Chenai Chair, and Garnett Achieng, mapping over 140 feminist organisations from across sub-Saharan Africa and setting out how feminist movements on the continent can be empowered through the production, sharing, and use of gender data and how that knowledge can be translated into actionable recommendations for private technology companies on the non-commercial sharing of their datasets. The report carried the substantive anchor framing of the programme — that "traditionally marginalised groups" should be "consulted and have a seat at the table" in data processes rather than studied at distance — and laid out the Afro-feminist methodological apparatus the programme has since extended through its manifesto, handbook, and continental co-creation work. The second was the public webinar "Building feminist data futures", held on the same day as the report release and serving as the report's primary public-presentation moment to the pan-African feminist field. The pairing of a written research artefact and a same-day public webinar gave the launch its double public-evidentiary spine: a deeply-researched documentary anchor for the programme's substantive position and a virtual convening register that could carry the position into the breadth of the sub-Saharan African feminist audience the programme was built around.

The three-language release and the breadth of the pan-African feminist audience

The launch's most structurally distinctive feature is the report's simultaneous release in English, French, and Portuguese — a deliberate methodological refusal of an English-language default and the substantive expression of the programme's commitment to the breadth of the sub-Saharan African feminist field. The continent's feminist movements operate across multiple linguistic spheres — Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone Africa each carry deep feminist civil-society infrastructure, but the AI-and-data governance field's working language across multilateral and continental venues has been overwhelmingly English. The trilingual release recodes that asymmetry at the campaign's founding artefact level: Francophone West and Central African feminist organisations, Lusophone Angolan and Mozambican feminist civil society, and the wider Portuguese-speaking African field are addressed as constituent audiences of the programme rather than as residual ones, and the report's circulation across the three linguistic spheres operates as the methodological foundation the rest of the campaign has been built on. The decision to release in three languages on day one — rather than producing an English-language artefact and translating later, or producing partial-language editions — is the launch's clearest single signal of the campaign's substantive Afro-feminist register.

The authors and the research base behind the launch

The report's three named authors — Neema Iyer, Pollicy's founder and Executive Director at the time of the launch; Chenai Chair, an African feminist-tech scholar with a long track record on internet-rights, data, and policy in southern Africa; and Garnett Achieng, then a Pollicy researcher — anchored the programme on a multi-country, multi-decade base of African feminist-tech expertise. The research base behind the launch is the team's mapping interviews with over 140 feminist organisations from across sub-Saharan Africa — a substantive empirical foundation that distinguishes the launch from the white-paper register that funder-and-think-tank Afro-AI policy work has often run on, and that ties the programme's normative framing to a documented record of how African feminist organisations were actually using and producing data at the time of publication. The same authorship anchor — and especially Iyer's directorship of Pollicy through the launch and Chair's continuing scholarly engagement on Afro-feminist data politics — has carried the programme's substantive register into its subsequent outputs across the campaign and into the wider African-feminist-AI scholarly field.

The programme run-up: from the April 2021 preview to the September launch

The 14 September launch did not arrive cold. Pollicy had been running the AFDF programme through earlier-2021 stages, including an April 2021 preview webinar co-hosted with the authors of Data Feminism (Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein), with Chenai Chair and Anwuli Okonjo. The April preview placed the programme on the public record well before the formal launch and built the constituency the September launch was addressing; by the time the September webinar ran, the AFDF cohort and the programme's substantive register had been seeded through the preview convening, the months of interview-based research, and the Pollicy project-archive August 2021 listing of the programme as a named line of organisational work. The launch on 14 September was therefore not the programme's first public moment but its consolidation moment — the day on which the substantive evidentiary core (the 140-organisation mapping) and the methodological-and-political framing (the consulted-and-at-the-table proposition) were placed on the public record together with the multilingual scaffolding the campaign has run on since.

Significance for the corpus

The 14 September 2021 launch is the corpus's first event anchored in Uganda and its first event whose principal artefact is a sub-Saharan African feminist-tech research report — closing a corpus event-anchor gap that the recent expansion of feminist-tech organisational coverage at Pollicy, Coding Rights, Derechos Digitales, and Digital Rights Foundation had previously sat in without a single sub-Saharan African feminist-tech event on the record. The event sits structurally alongside the corpus's existing Indian tracker-and-petition launch at the Internet Freedom Foundation's Project Panoptic launch of 27 November 2020 and the corpus's existing Mexican civil-society research-launch event at the R3D-led #GobiernoEspía launch of 19 June 2017 as one of the corpus's anchor Global South research-launch events — but distinct from both in its register: where Project Panoptic launched a public-procurement tracker and #GobiernoEspía launched a coalition-and-forensic-research targeted-surveillance investigation, the AFDF launch is the corpus's first Afro-feminist research-and-methodology launch placing gender, intersectionality, and decolonial African experience at the centre of an AI-governance work programme. The trilingual report release is the corpus's first event whose multilingual scope (English, French, and Portuguese) is structurally load-bearing for the launch artefact's audience-reach proposition rather than incidental to it.

Within the campaign's own arc the 14 September 2021 launch is the founding event the rest of the campaign sits on. The AFDF Report released on launch day became the substantive evidentiary base for the 2022 Internet Governance Forum's Afro-feminist AI Governance workshop, for the July 2023 Afro-Feminist Data Futures Manifesto produced from the AFDF Festival at DataFest Africa, for the October 2023 Towards Afro-feminist AI handbook authored by Amber Sinha and Bobina Zulfa, and for the Afro-Feminist Data Governance co-creation work running across Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia — each successor a development of the methodological apparatus the launch put on the public record on 14 September 2021. The launch is now also recorded in the wider feminist-AI scholarly field through the Oxford Academic chapter "Afrofeminist Data Futures" in Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, drawing the launch's framing into peer-reviewed feminist-AI scholarship.