Artificial intelligence (AI) has been presented as a transformative tool for addressing development challenges across Africa, from improving public services and healthcare to expanding economic opportunities and strengthening governance. Yet these narratives often overlook the social, political, and economic relations through which AI is designed, deployed, and experienced.
This webinar moves beyond what AI can do for development to examine what AI is doing to development, livelihoods, and everyday life. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives on AI governance, digital economies, development practice, media, gender and lived experience, the discussion will explore three interconnected questions: Whose knowledge is embedded in AI systems? How is AI reshaping livelihoods, labour and inequalities? And who has the power to define Africa’s technological futures? The webinar considers both the opportunities and risks of AI while foregrounding African agency, participation and alternative visions of development.
The webinar will take the form of a dialogue moderated by Caroline Williamson Sinalo, with speakers addressing questions related to their respective research areas. Following 45 minutes of moderated dialogue, we will open the floor to questions from the audience.
Speaker | Research-specific questions |
| Caroline Williamson Sinalo | AI, resource extraction, health and media: How does the resource extraction needed to fuel the global tech economy impact on health, the environment, politics and culture in African societies? What is the role of the media? |
| Diretnan Dikwal-Bot | AI, inequality and the value chain: Whose labour, culture and knowledge are incorporated into AI systems, and who captures value? |
| Elizabeth Resor | AI interventions and development practice: What happens when AI is introduced as a solution to development problems? What are the ethical and social consequences? |
| Thompson Gyedu Kwarkye | AI, power and governance: Who governs AI and who gets to define Africa's technological future? |
Speaker Biographies
- Caroline Williamson Sinalo is Lecturer in World Languages at University College Cork, author of Rwanda after Genocide: Gender, Identity and Posttraumatic Growth (Cambridge University Press 2018), and co-author of Transmitting Memories in Rwanda: From a Survivor Parent to the next Generation (Brill, 2023). She is also co-editor of Representing Gender-Based Violence: Global Perspectives (Macmillan, 2023). Williamson Sinalo sits on the Editorial Board for Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural Studies and on the Steering Committee of the Development Studies Association of Ireland. She recently completed a new book entitled: Mpox and the African Media: Narratives of Agency and Identity in a Global Syndemic which explores multilingual news media narratives of infectious diseases across the African continent.
- Diretnan Dikwal-Bot is an Assistant Professor in Digital Media Studies and Ad Astra Fellow at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on media, cultural politics, and social inequalities. Her current project on the African AI value chain examines the socio-economic and gendered hierarchies underpinning digital infrastructures, foregrounding questions of epistemic justice and extractivism. She is also the lead on Bridging Generations: Empowering Futures, a UCD Global-funded initiative that fosters equitable mentorship between African students and alumni, reimagining career development through solidarity rather than marketised individualism. Her recent publications include a book, Blogging and Gender Activism in Nigeria with Palgrave Macmillan and peer-reviewed articles in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Critical Discourse Studies and the International Journal of Cultural Politics.
- Elizabeth Resor is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Technological University Dublin. Her current project, Exploring the Ethics of AI for Global Development, maps out how Global Development actors are taking up AI in a moment of financial contraction and overlapping global crises. She has a PhD in Information Science from UC Berkeley and a Master of City Planning from MIT. Prior to her PhD, she worked in Kenya for several years at the intersection of civic technology, transportation and global development. She worked with local tech startups, academic researchers, NGOs, and the World Bank. Her work has been published in Big Data & Society, Policy & Internet, and the Proceedings of the ACM On Human-Computer Interaction.
- Dr Thompson Gyedu Kwarkye is the Principal Investigator of the AfroGAIN Project, funded through the MSCA ROSETTA Fellowship at the University of Galway, Ireland. This project investigates the political, ethical, and sociocultural dimensions of Africa’s AI governance, with particular attention to participatory policymaking, transnational AI standards, and the power relations that shape whose interests are represented in emerging digital futures. Thompson holds a PhD in Anthropology from Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany; an MSc in Human Security from Aarhus University, Denmark; and a BA in Political Science from the University of Ghana. His research interests draw on anthropology, political economy, digital technology, and development studies to examine how technological change relates to power, inequality, and social justice. Before joining the University of Galway, Thompson held postdoctoral positions at University College Dublin in Ireland and the University of Oxford in the UK. At UCD, he designed and taught undergraduate, postgraduate and microcredential courses in AI ethics and auditing. At Oxford, he was part of the ERC-funded ConflictNET project that examined the implications of European Union digital regulations for African societies and institutions. His work links critical scholarship to policy debates on governing digital technologies in ways that are more inclusive, accountable, and responsive to African priorities.