AI Ethics in the Global South: Capacity-strengthening and Learning

Overview

We are part of a network of experts supporting the grantees of Gates Foundation’s Global Grand Challenges 2023 program on “Catalysing Equitable Artificial Intelligence (AI) Use”. The programme, designed to explore the potential of GenAI to help solve some of the world’s greatest problems, awarded a total of over $5million to 50 projects based in low- and middle-income countries across Africa, Asia, and South America.

The Network of Experts was established and led by the Global Center on AI Governance (GCG), based in South Africa, with DFL in India, and the Institute for Technology and Society (ITS) in Brazil.

The expert consortium was tasked with assisting grantees in enhancing their projects' ethical and gender-transformative aspects, as well as generating evidence on how GenAI could help tackle socio-economic challenges in LMICs. Additionally, the experts continue to collaborate with the grantees in efforts to publish and disseminate the evidence and insights from these projects.

As part of this initiative, we have:

• Conducted 1:1 consultations with grantees in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) and South Africa, focusing on operationalising responsible AI principles for GenAI tools built for maternal healthcare, sexual healthcare, and gender-based violence.
• Conducted peer-learning sessions with grantees on user testing GenAI applications across various sectors and contexts.
• Hosted a closed-door roundtable on Gender and GenAI, bringing together grantees across different geographies and use cases to deliberate upon the various implications GenAI holds for gender equity.
• Acted as the editor of an online collection of writings on GenAI in the Global South, reviewing and compiling contributions from 35+ grantees across Asia and Africa.

The various outputs from this project are due to be released starting March 2025.