In Ethiopia’s industrial parks, women make up the majority of the workforce and the minority of the decisions made about their working conditions. Yanchi AI is being built to close that gap: an intelligent digital platform giving young female industrial workers accessible, localized, multilingual guidance on labor rights, fair wage standards, workplace safety, and professional skill development. It is a joint build by She Rises Charity Organization, a feminist advocacy group committed to women’s rights and equity in Ethiopia, and Abren for Generation, a tech-driven organization building digital solutions for young women and people with disabilities. Yanchi AI is developed through the Gender & AI Innovation Collective (GAIC).
The problem YanchiAI is built to solve
Women in Ethiopia’s industrial parks are highly organized by circumstance. They work the same shifts, in the same facilities, under the same management structures, which makes them reachable and countable in ways many informal workers are not. What has been missing is a channel that turns that proximity into voice and into protection: a way for labor rights, wage standards, and safety information to reach the women who need them, in a form they can actually use. Yanchi AI answers this through an intuitive conversational AI interface, translating complex labor protections into accessible, everyday guidance rather than asking women to navigate policy documents written for someone else.
What has been built, and what comes next
The interface and user experience design for Yanchi AI are complete, shaped by concerns women workers and their advocates raised directly. The backend, the part of the system that will process and act on this information, is still to be built. That work depends on primary data still to be collected from the factory floor, the industrial park administration, and workers’ federation partners, layered onto the secondary data already gathered. Once that baseline is in place, the plan is to pilot Yanchi AI in Bishoftu Industry Park, with Adama and Hawassa identified as the next sites if the model proves out.
How the partnership began
The journey started in the GAIC community learning zoom room hosted by A+ Alliance, where women’s rights organizations from across the continent gathered to learn about a feminist AI and a human rights based approach to technology. Among them were Abren for Generation and She Rises. The two organizations met during a breakout session and the synergy was immediate: Abren for Generation had the technical capability to build scalable digital tools, and She Rises brought ground-level expertise, trust within local communities, and an intersectional feminist framework tailored to young women factory workers in Ethiopia. Recognizing how naturally their strengths fit together, the two organizations signed a mutual agreement to collaborate on a shared mission, promoting decent work and economic empowerment for young female industrial workers across Ethiopia.
Why they are the right pair for this work
Yanchi AI’s design reflects a working method as much as a feature set, and that method depends on both organizations equally. A technically sound tool without community grounding risks solving the wrong problem. Community insight without technical capacity stays a document rather than a tool women can use. She Rises knows the root problems women face on the factory floor because that knowledge is the substance of its daily advocacy aligning with International Labor Organizations conventions and frameworks. Abren for Generation knows how to turn that knowledge into a working platform, including the terminology and architecture decisions that make a prototype usable. By pairing Abren’s technical capability with She Rises’ grounded advocacy networks and community workshops, the partnership is bridging the gap between innovation and grassroots activism.
The teams hold virtual check-ins to track the prototype, and they meet in person two days a week at Abren for Generation’s office in Addis Ababa. A memorandum of understanding is now in preparation to formalize the partnership beyond this project.
She Rises and Abren for Generation describe Yanchi AI as the start of a longer collaboration, one they intend to carry into new communities and new technical challenges. GAIC’s role in this stage is to support the prototyping process. Yanchi AI is still early, but its foundation is a feminist one: a tool built by a partnership that treats community knowledge and technical skill as equally indispensable, catalyzed by A+ Alliance’s commitment to bringing tech infrastructure and grassroots feminist advocates into the same room.
The Gender & AI Innovation Collective is a network of women’s rights organizations across Africa building AI tools for their own communities. Organizations bring the problem and the community knowledge; the Collective provides structured learning, technical mentorship, seed funding, and a secure development environment — and the organizations keep what they build. GAIC is working side-by-side to prototype and localize visions inside the AI Innovation Sandbox; a space designed specifically to turn shared knowledge into community-rooted tools. Co led by Women At The Table & Code for Africa.
Photo credits: Elise Racine & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/