Afrofeminist Data Futures

Afrofeminist Data Futures is a research report by Neema Iyer, Chenai Chair, and Garnett Achieng, published by Pollicy in March 2021 in English, French, and Portuguese editions. The report investigates how African feminist movements collect, share, and use digital data for social transformation, and proposes a framework — anchored in data feminism and African feminist traditions — for how data infrastructures on the continent might be rebuilt to centre rather than marginalise the women they currently miscount or misrepresent. It is the foundational publication anchoring Pollicy's Afro Feminist Data Futures programme and the corpus's first Ugandan-published and first Afro-feminist-tech-anchored publication.

Argument and central framing

The report's central argument is that data, "when applied accordingly, can be used to challenge dominant power imbalances and create social impact in communities" — but that the current African data ecosystem systematically fails African women: gender data is under-collected, what is collected is biased, and "[the collection of] basic data for marginalized groups such as LGBTQI+ people and migrants is often ignored, meaning women bearing these identities are further invisibilized". The report's underlying premise — "what is counted often becomes the basis for the development of appropriate programs and policies, and resource allocation" — repositions the question of African data governance from a technocratic problem of data quality to a political question about whose lives the African data infrastructure is built to see, and on whose terms. The report's framework is anchored in data feminism and African feminist traditions, and proposes that any account of "data for good" worth that name on the continent must begin from African women's own articulations of what better data infrastructures would look like rather than from imported Global North framings.

Methodology and scope

The research base is qualitative engagement with "over 40 women who lead grassroots movements, civil society organizations, academic institutions and small businesses from 20 countries across Africa", surfacing the interviewees' knowledge, practices, and challenges around using data for their missions. The 20-country sample range is the report's distinctive empirical contribution to the African digital-rights publication slate — most comparable continental studies anchor on three- or four-country comparative case bases, and the report's deliberate breadth across grassroots movements, civil society organisations, academia, and small-business owners is what allows it to substantiate the six headline challenges below as continent-level patterns rather than country-specific anomalies. The three-language publication (English, French, and Portuguese) is itself a methodological commitment to reach the breadth of the sub-Saharan African feminist field across the Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone language registers, rather than defaulting to English-language circulation in a continent whose feminist movements organise in all three.

The six headline challenges

The report names six recurring challenges facing African feminist movements working with data — surfaced from the 20-country interview base as cross-cutting patterns the participants confront in their organising:

1. Data literacy gaps and language barriers — the absence of accessible training in data collection, interpretation, and visualisation in the languages African feminist organisers actually work in, leaving even data-rich movements unable to operationalise what they hold.
2. Limited connectivity for women in sub-Saharan Africa — the report carries the 28%-of-women-online sub-Saharan connectivity figure as the substrate condition for any continental data-governance discussion, undermining any assumption of a digital-first organising baseline.
3. Resource constraints for data collection and analysis — the chronic underfunding of African feminist movements' own data work, which routes them into dependency on data infrastructures whose collection priorities they did not set.
4. Gatekeeping by institutions and private companies — the inability of African feminist movements to access the data held by states and platforms about their own communities, even where that data is the precondition for advocacy on the harms those communities face.
5. Lack of gender-disaggregated data — where data exists, the failure to break it out along gender lines makes it inoperable for gender-equality programming and renders the gendered harms of any policy intervention statistically invisible.
6. Restrictive technology platform policies — platform content-moderation and data-access policies set in Global North headquarters that systematically misread or de-platform African feminist content, and the absence of African feminist input into the design of those policies.

The substantive move that distinguishes the report is that the six challenges are not posed as discrete fixable defects to be solved one at a time inside the current data infrastructure but as a single integrated pattern of how that infrastructure currently produces and reproduces the invisibility of African women's lives — and the recommendations are correspondingly addressed at the structural level (fund African feminist data work; rebuild data-training infrastructure on the continent; require platforms to share non-commercial datasets accountably; situate African feminist movements as the methodological starting point rather than as consulted stakeholders) rather than as a checklist of individual platform asks.

Authorship

The report is co-authored by three Pollicy-affiliated researchers. Neema Iyer, Pollicy's founder and then-Executive Director and the corpus's Voice anchor on Afro-feminist civic technology, anchors the empirical and methodological framing inside Pollicy's wider Afro-feminist data-and-AI research line. Chenai Chair, then a researcher on AI and data with Mozilla and the African Observatory on Responsible AI, anchors the pan-African policy-research register and the connection to the broader Global South responsible-AI infrastructure. Garnett Achieng, then a Pollicy researcher, anchors the East African feminist-tech grassroots-organising register and the on-the-ground interview labour with the 20-country sample. (Chair and Achieng are not currently in the corpus as Person or Voice entries; only Iyer is reflected in the authors: frontmatter, in line with the Felicia Anthonio handling on Rising repression meets global resistance — Internet shutdowns in 2025 and the Fabio Chiusi handling on Automating Society Report 2020.) The report is funded by Meta as the named project partner.

Programmatic uptake

Afrofeminist Data Futures is the foundational artefact from which Pollicy's wider Afro Feminist Data Futures research programme was scoped, and the methodological anchor on which the organisation's subsequent Afro-feminist work is layered. The Afro-Feminist Data Governance project extends the report's framework into a four-country co-creation methodology across Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia working with governments, civil society, and regional economic zones. The 12-13 July 2023 Afro-Feminist Data Futures Festival at DataFest Africa brought together "25 participants, cutting across feminist activists, legal scholars, academia, and human rights defenders" to extend the report's vision into the Afro-Feminist Data Futures Manifesto (October 2023, authored by Iyer). And the report's framework was restated as a 2023 Oxford University Press book chapter by the same three authors in Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines (Browne, Cave, Drage, McInerney eds., pp. 347-388, Oxford University Press) — the chapter develops the report's empirical findings into a published vision of "an Afrofeminist data future" in which "African women have the right to privacy and full control over personal data and information online at all levels — a form of data justice", routing the African-feminist data-governance vocabulary into the mainstream Global North critical-feminist-AI academic literature.

Posture within the corpus

Within the corpus, Afrofeminist Data Futures is the publication-side anchor of the African feminist-tech publication sub-type that the corpus's existing Latin American publication anchors — Oppressive A.I.: Feminist Categories to Understand its Political Effects and Decisiones automatizadas en la función pública en América Latina — do not occupy. The three publications form the corpus's emerging Global South feminist-and-decolonial publications slate: the Coding Rights essay installs a feminist-decolonial political-power categorisation under a transfeminist Brazilian register, the Derechos Digitales report installs a comparative five-dimension human-rights audit methodology under a Spanish-language Latin American regional-advocacy register, and the Pollicy report installs a 20-country African-feminist qualitative data-infrastructure assessment under an Afro-feminist sub-Saharan-African Anglophone-Francophone-Lusophone register. All three publications refuse the framing that Global South regions absorb Global North AI critique; all three develop their analytical vocabulary from their own regional feminist traditions.

The report is also the publication-side anchor of Pollicy on the corpus's publications slate — the organisation's Afro Feminist Data Futures programme, the Towards Afro-feminist AI handbook, the Afro-Feminist Data Governance project, and the Afro-Feminist Data Futures Manifesto are all named in the org body, but this report is the first Publication entry in the corpus that anchors the Pollicy publication line and the broader Afro-feminist civic-technology methodological programme. In the corpus's regional shape, Afrofeminist Data Futures is the African feminist-tech publication counterpart to Oppressive A.I.'s Latin American feminist-tech publication anchor — the corpus's first sub-Saharan African Afro-feminist-published research artefact and its principal Afro-feminist data-governance reference point.