Open Studio: AI & Climate Change, Community, Data & Feminism | Pyrou Chung
2024-10-29 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Helsinki)
Based in Thailand, Pyrou Chung directs the East West Management Institute Programs on natural resources, land, and data initiatives in Southeast Asia under the Open Development Initiative.
Pyrou has over 20 years of experience in the development sector across Asia, Africa and Australia. As an ecologist and sustainable development expert, her work has been focused on the nexus between environmental governance, conservation and human rights, with an emphasis on digital technologies and artificial intelligence affecting environmental data justice issues. Through partnerships and participatory action research this work explores these intersections in order for Indigenous Peoples and environmental defenders to seek self-determination rights over lands and territories.
Join the Open Studio by joining the AI Equality Community on Circle!

Open Studio: Evaluation of SOF+IA in light of Data Feminism Principles | Daniela Moyano
2024-11-11 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Helsinki)
In this open studio, Daniela Moyano will speak about Sof+IA: a prototype chatbot designed to report and provide guidance on Digital Gender Violence (DGV) in Chile. This evaluation examines its development through Data Feminism principles, highlighting how it challenges power structures, prioritizes survivor needs, and integrates emotion into technology design. Despite challenges such as limited resources and inclusion gaps, Sof+IA centers survivors’ experiences and promotes pluralism. Continuous reflection and evaluation are essential for integrating feminist principles into AI development.
About Daniela MoyanoDaniela Moyano is an information designer and data visualization expert with a focus on gender data and feminist perspectives. With a B.A. in Design and an M.S.C. in Sociology, she has co-founded ODEGI, an observatory promoting critical gender data use. Daniela has led multiple research and design projects, including Sof+IA, a chatbot addressing digital gender violence. Her work blends technology, social justice, and feminist theory, advocating for more inclusive and ethical technological practices.

Join the Open Studio by joining the AI Equality Community on Circle!

Open Studio: AI & Health, thinking through maintenance, repair and response-ability | Amina Soulimani
2024-11-12 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Helsinki)
This open studio will focus on exploring the multiple ways through which we can understand the entanglement of repair and maintenance with visionary aspirations around smart hospitals. By revisiting earlier and contemporary Feminist STS texts, new materialism, phenomenology and leaning on insights from the field, Amina will share insights emerging from her ongoing PhD research. Presenting Morocco as a case study, this talk shall explore further the dimensions that waiting takes in environments that run through foreign software in local hospitals.
About Amina Soulimani: Amina Soulimani’s research investigates human-technology interactions in oncology care, and algorithmic infrastructures within hospitals in Morocco. Her work is guided primarily through interdisciplinary practice, decolonial scholarship, and critical realism when dreaming about dignified care futures. She is Doctoral Research Fellow at HUMA, The Institute for Humanities in Africa, and a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Join the Open Studio by joining the AI Equality Community on Circle!

Open Studio: Much Distress and Little Relief | Jamie Fuller
2024-11-18 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Helsinki)
Earlier this year, predictive optimization was introduced into South Africa’s social grant system to detect and counter fraud. As a result, thousands (and counting) of the country’s most financially vulnerable have been mistakenly excluded from receiving their grant payment. This open studio unpacks the case study, explaining what went wrong and reflecting on a more productive use of AI. It concludes that while AI may be most alluring in the resource-constrained realities of developing countries, it is precisely in such contexts that it poses the greatest threat.
About the speaker: Jamie Fuller is a junior researcher at Research ICT Africa, a Cape Town – based think tank committed to enabling universal and meaningful digital access across the continent. She holds a Masters degree in Philosophy and is especially passionate about everyday ethical dilemmas, including those associated with advanced data-driven technologies.

Join the Open Studio by joining the AI Equality Community on Circle!

Open Studio: Can Bias in LLMs Be Used for Good? | Francesca Lucchini Wortzman
2024-12-02 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Helsinki)
It is a well-known fact that LLMs express harmful biases in their predictions. The main source comes from the training datasets, which are too large and expensive to check thoroughly. In this open studio, Francesca Lucchini will explore how we can leverage the bias in LLMs and use them to examine massive datasets, discovering starting points for a data audit.
About the speaker: Francesca Lucchini Wortzman is a Tech Lead at CENIA, the National Artificial Intelligence Research Center. She has a computer science and masters degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, she specializes in machine learning applications related to urban analysis and computer vision. Francesca is passionate about gender equality and applied ethics in AI.

Join the Open Studio by joining the AI Equality Community on Circle!

The African AI & Equality Toolbox Launch
2025-09-08 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
The African AI & Equality Toolbox is a strategic initiative designed to empower African stakeholders—policymakers, technologists, civil society actors, and communities—to shape Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that are contextually relevant, inclusive, and grounded in human rights.
Developed in collaboration with Women at the Table and the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), and adapted from the global <AI & Equality> Human Rights Toolbox Initiative in collaboration with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), this African iteration provides practical tools and methodologies to guide equitable AI development across the continent.
The Toolbox applies a Human Rights-based AI Lifecycle Framework, integrating reflective questions and the Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) developed with the Alan Turing Institute. It emphasizes participatory, multidisciplinary approaches and is rooted in feminist, decolonial, and Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) principles and incorporates lessons from emerging digital rights challenges, ensuring AI systems are designed with safety and dignity at their core.
This launch webinar will present the methodology and the process of development of the toolbox featuring the contributors and introduce the webinar series that focus on each stage of the lifecycle with the selected case studies.
1PM GMT | 3PM SAST | 4PM EAT
Register here

The African AI & Equality Toolbox Webinar 1: Introduction & Stage 1
2025-09-15 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
Across African contexts, development and technology projects are often driven by external actors with little grounding in local priorities. Solutions frequently arrive pre-packaged—built around assumed problems, rather than those identified by communities themselves. This is particularly evident in AI deployments in agriculture, education, and public health, where tools may miss the mark, or worse, exacerbate inequities.
This webinar serves to explore Stage 1 of AI Development which is fundamentally a participatory and grounded approach which is crucial for centering gender equity, given that women often carry the brunt of labor in agriculture and caregiving, yet remain underrepresented in AI design and governance.
The African AI & Equality Toolbox is a strategic initiative designed to empower African stakeholders—policymakers, technologists, civil society actors, and communities—to shape Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that are contextually relevant, inclusive, and grounded in human rights.
Developed by Women at the Table and the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), and adapted from the global AI & Equality Human Rights Toolbox Initiative in collaboration with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), this African iteration provides practical tools and methodologies to guide equitable AI development across the continent.
The Toolbox applies a Human Rights-based AI Lifecycle Framework, integrating reflective questions and the Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) developed with the Alan Turing Institute. It emphasizes participatory, multidisciplinary approaches and is rooted in feminist, decolonial, and Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) principles and incorporates lessons from emerging digital rights challenges, ensuring AI systems are designed with safety and dignity at their core.
1PM GMT | 3PM SAST | 4PM EAT
Register here

The African AI & Equality Toolbox Webinar 2: System Requirements
2025-10-06 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
In many African AI deployments, system requirements are defined by international technical partners or funders, often without fully understanding the day-to-day realities of use. This leads to design choices—like requiring high-speed internet, English-only interfaces, or complex interfaces—that make tools ineffective or even harmful.
This webinar looks at how requirement setting should function as a bridge between vision and use: Aligning system features with cultural context, infrastructure gaps, and social expectations; Identifying constraints early on—connectivity, literacy, consent, power dynamics—and building around them and making conscious trade-offs between speed, scale, and equity.

The African AI & Equality Toolbox is a strategic initiative designed to empower African stakeholders—policymakers, technologists, civil society actors, and communities—to shape Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that are contextually relevant, inclusive, and grounded in human rights.
Developed by Women at the Table and the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), and adapted from the global AI & Equality Human Rights Toolbox Initiative in collaboration with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), this African iteration provides practical tools and methodologies to guide equitable AI development across the continent.
The Toolbox applies a Human Rights-based AI Lifecycle Framework, integrating reflective questions and the Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) developed with the Alan Turing Institute. It emphasizes participatory, multidisciplinary approaches and is rooted in feminist, decolonial, and Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) principles and incorporates lessons from emerging digital rights challenges, ensuring AI systems are designed with safety and dignity at their core.
1PM GMT | 3PM SAST | 4PM EAT
Register here

The Latin American AI & Equality Toolbox Introduction
2025-10-16 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Moscow)
AI & Equality partnered with the Chilean Centro Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial, CENIA, to co-construct a Latin American Spanish language version of the validated <AI & Equality> Toolbox, with use cases relevant to the regional experience.

The partnership builds on the learnings from the workshop structure and outreach from the African <AI & Equality> Toolbox.

Translating and adapting tools like the <AI & Equality> Human Rights Toolbox can facilitate the co-creation of a common vocabulary and common understanding on the specific needs and challenges of each region of the world, unlocking informed debates about their visions for data with purpose and collaboratively finding examples of regional use cases of AI.

3PM ET | 10AM Santiago
Register here

The African AI & Equality Toolbox Webinar 3: Data Discovery
2025-10-20 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
In many African AI projects, available datasets are either imported (trained on non-African populations) or incomplete (lacking local language, gender, or cultural nuance). This misalignment risks perpetuating systemic bias under the guise of neutrality.This webinar will offer a deep dive into the Essential Questions of Data Discovery including a case study on the requirement for building effective TFGBV prevention datasets that include African languages.

The African AI & Equality Toolbox is a strategic initiative designed to empower African stakeholders—policymakers, technologists, civil society actors, and communities—to shape Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that are contextually relevant, inclusive, and grounded in human rights.
Developed by Women at the Table and the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), and adapted from the global AI & Equality Human Rights Toolbox Initiative in collaboration with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), this African iteration provides practical tools and methodologies to guide equitable AI development across the continent.
The Toolbox applies a Human Rights-based AI Lifecycle Framework, integrating reflective questions and the Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) developed with the Alan Turing Institute. It emphasizes participatory, multidisciplinary approaches and is rooted in feminist, decolonial, and Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) principles and incorporates lessons from emerging digital rights challenges, ensuring AI systems are designed with safety and dignity at their core.
1PM GMT | 3PM SAST | 4PM EAT
Register here

The African AI & Equality Toolbox Webinar 4: Model Selection
2025-11-05 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
Imported or generalized models often underperform—especially when they are trained on data that does not reflect local language, environment, or lived experience. For AI to be trustworthy, accuracy alone is not enough.
This webinar dives into what inclusion and efficiency means ensuring the development or building of systems that don’t require technical expertise to interpret—ensuring that trust, oversight, and agency are accessible to all users. Whether a rural health worker, a student, or a community organizer, each person should be able to understand what a system is doing and why.
The African AI & Equality Toolbox is a strategic initiative designed to empower African stakeholders—policymakers, technologists, civil society actors, and communities—to shape Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that are contextually relevant, inclusive, and grounded in human rights.
Developed by Women at the Table and the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), and adapted from the global AI & Equality Human Rights Toolbox Initiative in collaboration with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), this African iteration provides practical tools and methodologies to guide equitable AI development across the continent.
The Toolbox applies a Human Rights-based AI Lifecycle Framework, integrating reflective questions and the Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) developed with the Alan Turing Institute. It emphasizes participatory, multidisciplinary approaches and is rooted in feminist, decolonial, and Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) principles and incorporates lessons from emerging digital rights challenges, ensuring AI systems are designed with safety and dignity at their core.
1PM GMT | 3PM SAST | 4PM EAT
Register here

The African AI & Equality Toolbox Webinar 5: Model Interpretation
2025-11-12 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
In African deployments, there is often pressure to launch rapidly, without thorough contextual testing. But skipping this step is where trust breaks down—and harm begins. Testing must happen with communities, not just on them.
This stage examines the opportunity to reflect on how power operates in AI: Who gets to say if it works? Who can question it? Who can stop it?
The African AI & Equality Toolbox is a strategic initiative designed to empower African stakeholders—policymakers, technologists, civil society actors, and communities—to shape Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that are contextually relevant, inclusive, and grounded in human rights.
Developed by Women at the Table and the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), and adapted from the global AI & Equality Human Rights Toolbox Initiative in collaboration with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), this African iteration provides practical tools and methodologies to guide equitable AI development across the continent.
The Toolbox applies a Human Rights-based AI Lifecycle Framework, integrating reflective questions and the Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) developed with the Alan Turing Institute. It emphasizes participatory, multidisciplinary approaches and is rooted in feminist, decolonial, and Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) principles and incorporates lessons from emerging digital rights challenges, ensuring AI systems are designed with safety and dignity at their core.
1PM GMT | 3PM SAST | 4PM EAT
Register here

The Latin American AI & Equality Toolbox Launch
2025-11-13 14:00 - 15:00 (Europe/Paris)
AI & Equality partnered with the Chilean Centro Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial, CENIA, to co-construct a Latin American Spanish language version of the validated <AI & Equality> Toolbox, with use cases relevant to the regional experience.

The partnership builds on the learnings from the workshop structure and outreach from the African <AI & Equality> Toolbox.

Translating and adapting tools like the <AI & Equality> Human Rights Toolbox can facilitate the co-creation of a common vocabulary and common understanding on the specific needs and challenges of each region of the world, unlocking informed debates about their visions for data with purpose and collaboratively finding examples of regional use cases of AI.

2PM ET | 10AM Santiago
Register here

The African AI & Equality Toolbox Webinar 6: Deployment
2025-11-19 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow)
In African contexts, post-deployment oversight is often underfunded or overlooked. Once a system is launched—especially by international actors—it can become invisible, even as its consequences grow. This final stage and webinar of The African AI & Equality Toolbox looks at what true accountability means: planning for ongoing monitoring, shared governance, and the possibility of “no.” The webinar will also explore what it means for systems to be responsive—not just to data—but to dignity.
The African AI & Equality Toolbox is a strategic initiative designed to empower African stakeholders—policymakers, technologists, civil society actors, and communities—to shape Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that are contextually relevant, inclusive, and grounded in human rights.
Developed by Women at the Table and the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), and adapted from the global AI & Equality Human Rights Toolbox Initiative in collaboration with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), this African iteration provides practical tools and methodologies to guide equitable AI development across the continent.
The Toolbox applies a Human Rights-based AI Lifecycle Framework, integrating reflective questions and the Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) developed with the Alan Turing Institute. It emphasizes participatory, multidisciplinary approaches and is rooted in feminist, decolonial, and Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) principles and incorporates lessons from emerging digital rights challenges, ensuring AI systems are designed with safety and dignity at their core.
1PM GMT | 3PM SAST | 4PM EAT
Register here
