The organizations with the deepest knowledge of what gender inequality actually looks like — in gender-based violence services, health access programmes, economic justice work — almost never have AI engineers on staff. Without shared infrastructure they face two options: depend indefinitely on external technologists, or be excluded from shaping AI at all.
Meanwhile organizations rebuild similar tools in isolation, duplicating effort and cost. And the fallback option, a chatbot with pre-programmed answers, cannot handle the complexity of the problems these organizations are actually working on.
The Sandbox removes the infrastructure barrier without transferring ownership.
A secure cloud environment with data protection appropriate to sensitive gender and rights work
Pre-configured open-source large language models
Controlled access to selected external AI services
A "prompt forge" — a library of templated prompt engineering scripts
Pre-configured AI agents and machine learning tools
Security, ethics, and documentation resources throughout
A Foundation Knowledge Base: curated research on women's rights, feminist theory, decoloniality, feminist economics, human rights methodologies including HUDERIA, data feminism principles, and country-specific legal frameworks
Conceptual grounding in how AI systems work. Hands-on practice with AI concepts and basic programming. Structured mentorship. Risk-free experimentation, where a failed attempt costs nothing.
Rapid prototyping. Community co-creation. Shared resources instead of duplicated ones. Technical support on demand — with the organization retaining ownership of the process, the data, and the output.
Publicly available AI services are increasingly trained on low-quality or flawed baseline data. As that dilution compounds, the value of a carefully curated corpus rises. The Foundation Knowledge Base is deliberately built from best-of-breed research on women’s rights and feminist practice, so that what organizations build on top of it inherits something worth inheriting.
The sandbox was conceived and has been curated by Women At The Table.
The Sandbox is designed as innovation-in-a-box. Technical architecture, training curricula, mentorship protocols, and sustainability frameworks are documented from the start, under Creative Commons licensing, so the model can be implemented elsewhere without depending on the people who built it.
Currently available to organizations in the Gender & AI Innovation Collective. Infrastructure is maintained by Code for Africa.