Resources
A curated bibliography of works at the intersection of Digital Humanities, Artificial Intelligence and African Studies, compiled to inform the workshop's discussions and position paper.
Et si le futur le plus utile de l'IA s'écrivait en Afrique ? Alors que l’Unesco et l'AI Movement de Rabat les mettent à l'honneur, zoom sur les recherches de cinq femmes scientifiques, du Bénin au Maroc en passant par le Sénégal, le Cameroun et la Côte d'Ivoire. Leur point commun ? Elles refusent…
Analyzing the innovative and popular uses of digital media technologies across many African countries, African Digital Cultures reveals how digitization, through its inherent computational and epistemological logics, is deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people, producing new…
This article examines how three generations of jasare – Zarma genealogists and historian griots from Niger – have responded to the challenges of recording and digitizing their performances, from analogue archives to social media platforms. It explores the tensions between performance and fixation,…
In the last decade, several organisations, and national and international agencies have developed impact assessments (IAs) to mitigate the risks and impact of AI systems as well as to promote responsible, just and trustworthy design, development and deployment. However, through a critical review of…
From 28 to 30 April 2026, a team from the University of Luxembourg had the privilege of traveling to Nairobi, Kenya, for a week-long exchange centred on public and participatory history.
If AI is not designed properly, inequalities can reappear in new, digital forms.
When you ask a voice assistant a question in English, French, or Mandarin, the underlying models have been trained on billions of words and millions of hours of speech. Ask the same question in Bafia, Mada, or Suundi, and the technology simply doesn't know how to listen. The Institute of African…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly recognized as a technology that can improve government operations in Africa. It enhances policy processes, strengthens decision-making, increases efficiency, and transforms public service delivery. Yet, public sector adoption of AI systems in African…
Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity, Fola Adeleke, highlights how the erosion of traditional media business models and the rise of AI-driven disinformation pose a grave threat to democratic discourse. He recently featured as a speaker at an Atlantic Institute's XR Lab event on the…
This essay is adapted from an intervention I gave at the Mashariki Cooperation Conference, which took place in Diani, Kenya, from the 8th-11th April 2026.
Background In late 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, igniting a global boom around generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Governments, businesses and individuals began to rapidly incorporate these powerful technologies into everyday processes and tasks, heralding a new era of technology use, most…
Open-source artificial intelligence is widely promoted as a democratising pathway to digital sovereignty for African states, offering access to frontier architectures without prohibitive capital investment. This paper investigates whether open-source AI represents a credible route to autonomy or…
Vom 18. bis 20. Februar 2026 kamen 26 Forschende aus 16 Ländern im Schloss Herrenhausen in Hannover zusammen. Vorträge gab es keine. Stattdessen wechselten sich Plenarsitzungen, vier thematische Arbeitsgruppen, World-Café-Runden, Posterpräsentationen und gemeinsames Schreiben ab. Das Ziel war nicht…
DOCiD is a unique persistent identifier for African research outputs.
Advancing Tech Justice in Africa examines technology governance across Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa three countries that together anchor West, East, and Southern Africa's digital trajectories. African digitalisation is intersecting with deep structural inequalities in labour, gender, climate,…
A new study finds African content moderators report worse mental health than global peers, amid low pay, precarious work, and exposure to traumatic content.
The advancement of speech technology has predominantly favored high-resource languages, creating a significant digital divide for speakers of most Sub-Saharan African languages. To address this gap, we introduce WAXAL, a large-scale, openly accessible speech dataset for 21 languages representing…
The Langarchiv project, officially titled “Language as Archive: European Linguistics and the Social History of the Sahara and Sahel in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century,” is an ambitious research initiative funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Its primary goal is to explore how…