Pollicy

Pollicy is a Kampala-headquartered Ugandan feminist collective of technologists, data scientists, creatives, and academics working at the intersection of data, design, and technology to — in its own framing — "craft better life experiences by harnessing improved data". Founded in 2016 by Neema Iyer, the organisation is the principal civil-society anchor on Afro-feminist data and AI governance in East Africa and the corpus's first Ugandan civil-society organisation, the first sub-Saharan African feminist-tech organisational anchor, and the principal pan-African counterpart to the corpus's existing Latin American feminist-tech pole at Coding Rights.

Founding and leadership

Pollicy was founded in 2016 in Kampala by Neema Iyer — an Indian-Ugandan technologist and artist who moved to Uganda and built the organisation around the proposition that government service delivery and civic technology in Africa needed to be reshaped through better, more responsible data practice. Iyer served as Executive Director through August 2023, when she stepped down and continues as advisor and board member; she was named a 2021 Quartz Africa Innovator and received the 2021 Digital Equality Award (Research and Knowledge Builder category), was appointed to Facebook's Global Women's Safety Advisory Board in July 2021, and held a 2021-2022 Stanford PACS Digital Civil Society Lab fellowship and a Mozilla Media Fellowship that routed Pollicy's East African feminist-tech work into the wider Global North digital-rights field. Iyer was succeeded as Executive Director in August 2023 by Irene Mwendwa, whose background combines a feminist commitment to digital and data equality with partnership-building and funding-landscape expertise. Pollicy's staff grew to over 15 employees by 2019 and the organisation has, as of its 2021 self-reporting, run more than 100 projects, hosted more than 200 data events, and trained around 5,000 people.

Mission and posture

Pollicy's self-statement of mission frames its work around three core priorities — improving data literacy among stakeholders, promoting data use by civil society and government for decision-making, and fostering conversations around responsible and ethical data use. The organisation's Afro-feminist posture toward AI governance treats African feminist movements not as an afterthought to imported Global North digital-rights vocabularies but as the methodological starting point — a substantive thread that runs through the organisation's whole programme portfolio, from civic-tech tools and government data-literacy training through to AI-governance research and speculative-fiction commissioning. This Afro-feminist grounding is what distinguishes Pollicy structurally from the corpus's other pan-African digital-rights anchors at Paradigm Initiative, which run from West African digital-rights and digital-inclusion registers; and is the substantive register that places Pollicy alongside Coding Rights as the corpus's two principal feminist-tech organisational anchors, on the African and Latin American sides respectively.

Afro Feminist Data Futures

Pollicy's signature programmatic anchor is the Afro Feminist Data Futures research programme, launched in 2021 as the organisation's headline body of work on data, gender, and AI from a sub-Saharan African feminist standpoint. The programme's anchor report — published in English, French, and Portuguese to reach the breadth of the sub-Saharan African feminist movement — examines how African feminist movements can be empowered through gender data production and sharing, 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. Beneath the headline report sit a sustained set of further outputs: the Afro-Feminist Data Governance project running co-creation methodologies with governments, civil society, and regional economic zones across Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia; the Afro-Feminist AI Governance workshop at the 2022 Internet Governance Forum; and the July 2023 Afro-Feminist Data Futures Festival at DataFest Africa, which brought together twenty-five feminist activists, legal scholars, academics, and human-rights defenders from across Africa to re-envision the future of data from an Afro-feminist perspective. Afro Feminist Data Futures is the corpus's clearest documented sustained African-feminist-grassroots-organising-on-AI-and-data programme.

Towards Afro-feminist AI

The intellectual core of Pollicy's AI-governance work is the Towards Afro-feminist AI: A Handbook for approaching Governance of AI in Africa, published in October 2023 and authored by Amber Sinha and Bobina Zulfa. 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 builds on the companion Principles of Afro-feminist AI Data and on the IGF 2022 workshop "Afro-feminist AI Governance: Challenges and Lessons" that Pollicy convened. Within the corpus, the handbook is the African-feminist methodological counterpart to Coding Rights's Oppressive A.I.: Feminist Categories to Understand its Political Effects — 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.

Online gender-based violence, digital safety, and civic-tech work

Alongside the Afro-feminist data and AI register, Pollicy maintains a sustained body of work on online gender-based violence (OGBV) and digital safety that engages African women, journalists, activists, politicians, and human-rights defenders in shaping how the platforms and increasingly AI-driven moderation systems treat them. The Online Gender Based Violence project developed an interactive tool to help African women navigate the internet and to surface gaps in legal frameworks on online harassment, complemented by the Amplified Abuse research line launched in August 2021, (In)Visible on the digital threats faced by Muslim Women Human Rights Defenders launched in May 2022, and the wider Future of Work: Digital Safety for Women in the Workplace programme launched in March 2022. The Digital Safetea game launched in September 2021 dramatises the digital threats faced by three fictional women — including Zoom-bombing, impersonation, and non-consensually shared sexually explicit imagery — as an interactive learning experience for women across Africa, and the VOTE: Women initiative builds data skills among women politicians to increase women's participation in governance. Alongside this OGBV body of work, Pollicy's civic-tech and government-accountability portfolio runs through the Wetaase human-trafficking tracking platform, the Digital Services Academy skills-training programme, and the Choose Your Own Fake News misinformation-awareness game developed with Mozilla support in 2020 to teach East African internet users how to evaluate information they encounter online.

Africana Futurism and the speculative register

Pollicy's distinctive contribution to the corpus's range of methodological registers is its commissioning of speculative African fiction on technology futures, which sits alongside the empirical-research and policy-engagement work as a parallel mode of public engagement on AI and digital rights. The Africana Futurism: Speculative Fiction from Africa call, launched in 2022, invited submissions from young Africans aged 16-27 examining "how Africans today living on the continent are exploring, navigating and interacting with digital technologies", with peer-review evaluation and publication of the top fifteen entries. The speculative-fiction work pairs with Pollicy's broader creative output — the CreateYourKampala community arts initiative and the Alternate Realities, Alternate Internets research line — to extend Pollicy's methodological vocabulary beyond conventional research-and-advocacy registers into participatory creative practice, in a structural parallel to Coding Rights's Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies on the Latin American side.

Coalition role and pan-African positioning

Beyond its own programmes, Pollicy sits inside the broader pan-African digital-rights field as a connector across multiple coalitions and convening venues. The organisation is one of two named Memorandum-of-Understanding partners of the Data Labellers Association — alongside the Kenyan civic-tech organisation Siasa Place — at the DLA's 13 February 2025 Nairobi launch under the theme "Empowering the People Powering AI", positioning Pollicy as the Ugandan civic-tech anchor inside the pan-African AI-supply-chain worker-organising field that includes the African Content Moderators Union, the Africa Tech Workers Movement, and Foxglove. The organisation also runs the Uganda chapter of the Fairwork Uganda Ratings programme on platform-worker conditions launched in August 2023, contributes to Paradigm Initiative's DRIF pan-African digital-rights convenings, and routes Iyer's personal participation in the Berkman Klein orbit through Stanford PACS into Pollicy's wider transnational research infrastructure.

Posture in the movement

Within the corpus's frame, Pollicy occupies a distinctive position — the African Afro-feminist anchor on AI-and-data governance and the principal Ugandan civil-society organisation engaging non-AI publics (African women, grassroots community organisers, women politicians, journalists, human-rights defenders, persons with disabilities, Muslim women HRDs, and platform workers) in shaping how AI and the wider technological field are built, deployed, and held accountable. Its theory of change runs in three directions at once: outward into pan-African and international policy processes through DRIF, the Internet Governance Forum, and the DLA / Africa Tech Workers Movement coalition; inward into the design and methodology of African civic-tech work itself through the Towards Afro-feminist AI handbook, the Afro Feminist Data Futures programme, and the Africana Futurism speculative-fiction commissioning; and downward into the African and East African public sphere through the OGBV, VOTE: Women, Digital Safetea, and Choose Your Own Fake News tools and convenings. Its 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 actually 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. In the corpus's regional shape, Pollicy is the African feminist-tech counterpart to Coding Rights's Latin American feminist-tech anchor and the methodological complement to Paradigm Initiative's West-African / pan-African digital-rights and digital-inclusion anchor — the corpus's first sub-Saharan African feminist-tech organisational pole and its principal Afro-feminist AI-governance anchor.