Data Flows and Colonial Regimes in Africa: A Critical Analysis of the Colonial Futurities Embedded in AI Ecosystems

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19283v1
• Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:31:50 GMT
• Title: Data Flows and Colonial Regimes in Africa: A Critical Analysis of the Colonial Futurities Embedded in AI Ecosystems
• Authors: Ndaka. A, Avila-Acosta. F, Mbula-Ndaka. H, Amera. C, Chauke. S, Majiwa. E,
• Abstract summary: This chapter seeks to frame the elemental and invisible problems of AI and big data in the African context.<n>It will present reflections on how these sites are using AI recommendation algorithms to recreate new digital societies in the region.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: This chapter seeks to frame the elemental and invisible problems of AI and big data in the African context by examining digital sites and infrastructure through the lens of power and interests. It will present reflections on how these sites are using AI recommendation algorithms to recreate new digital societies in the region, how they have the potential to propagate algorithmic colonialism and negative gender norms, and what this means for the regional sustainable development agenda. The chapter proposes adopting business models that embrace response-ability and consider the existence of alternative socio-material worlds of AI. These reflections will mainly come from ongoing discussions with Kenyan social media users in this authors' user space talks, personal experiences and six months of active participant observations done by the authors.

Related papers

• The AI Imperative: Scaling High-Quality Peer Review in Machine Learning [49.87236114682497]
  We argue that AI-assisted peer review must become an urgent research and infrastructure priority.<n>We propose specific roles for AI in enhancing factual verification, guiding reviewer performance, assisting authors in quality improvement, and supporting ACs in decision-making.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-06-09T18:37:14Z)
• Automatic Speech Recognition for African Low-Resource Languages: Challenges and Future Directions [4.524096445909663]
  Low-resource languages in Africa remain significantly underrepresented in both research and practical applications.<n>This study investigates the major challenges hindering the development of ASR systems for these languages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-05-16T20:57:39Z)
• Bridging the Gap: Integrating Ethics and Environmental Sustainability in AI Research and Practice [57.94036023167952]
  We argue that the efforts aiming to study AI's ethical ramifications should be made in tandem with those evaluating its impacts on the environment.<n>We propose best practices to better integrate AI ethics and sustainability in AI research and practice.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-01T13:53:11Z)
• Particip-AI: A Democratic Surveying Framework for Anticipating Future AI Use Cases, Harms and Benefits [54.648819983899614]
  General purpose AI seems to have lowered the barriers for the public to use AI and harness its power. We introduce PARTICIP-AI, a framework for laypeople to speculate and assess AI use cases and their impacts.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-21T19:12:37Z)
• The Case for Globalizing Fairness: A Mixed Methods Study on Colonialism, AI, and Health in Africa [16.7528939567041]
  We conduct a scoping review to propose axes of disparities for fairness consideration in the African context. We then conduct qualitative research studies with 672 general population study participants and 28 experts inML, health, and policy. Our analysis focuses on colonialism as the attribute of interest and examines the interplay between artificial intelligence (AI), health, and colonialism.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-05T22:54:15Z)
• Case Studies of AI Policy Development in Africa [1.3194391758295114]
  Artificial Intelligence (AI) requires new ways of evaluating national technology use and strategy for African nations. We conclude that existing global readiness assessments do not fully capture African states' progress in AI readiness.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-29T19:17:11Z)
• Empowering Africa: An In-depth Exploration of the Adoption of Artificial Intelligence Across the Continent [0.0]
  The study considers regional nuances, cultural factors, and infrastructural constraints shaping the deployment of AI solutions in Africa. Case studies in healthcare, agriculture, finance, and education highlight AI's transformative potential for efficiency, accessibility, and inclusivity. Ethical considerations, including data privacy and algorithmic bias, are addressed alongside policy frameworks supporting responsible AI implementation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-12-28T12:07:13Z)
• Evaluating and Improving Value Judgments in AI: A Scenario-Based Study on Large Language Models' Depiction of Social Conventions [5.457150493905063]
  We evaluate how contemporary AI services competitively meet user needs, then examined society's depiction as mirrored by Large Language Models. We suggest a model of decision-making in value-conflicting scenarios which could be adopted for future machine value judgments. This paper advocates for a practical approach to using AI as a tool for investigating other remote worlds.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-04T08:42:02Z)
• Bridging the Gap: A Survey on Integrating (Human) Feedback for Natural Language Generation [68.9440575276396]
  This survey aims to provide an overview of the recent research that has leveraged human feedback to improve natural language generation. First, we introduce an encompassing formalization of feedback, and identify and organize existing research into a taxonomy following this formalization. Second, we discuss how feedback can be described by its format and objective, and cover the two approaches proposed to use feedback (either for training or decoding): directly using the feedback or training feedback models. Third, we provide an overview of the nascent field of AI feedback, which exploits large language models to make judgments based on a set of principles and minimize the need for
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-05-01T17:36:06Z)
• The Role of AI in Drug Discovery: Challenges, Opportunities, and Strategies [97.5153823429076]
  The benefits, challenges and drawbacks of AI in this field are reviewed. The use of data augmentation, explainable AI, and the integration of AI with traditional experimental methods are also discussed.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-12-08T23:23:39Z)
• Earth Observation and the New African Rural Datascapes: Defining an Agenda for Critical Research [0.0]
  Increasing availability of Earth Observation data could transform the use and governance of African rural landscapes. Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the development of EO data applications targeted at stakeholders in African agricultural systems. There is still relatively little critical scholarship questioning how EO data are accessed, presented, disseminated and used in different socio-political contexts.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-08-23T06:05:16Z)
• MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages [48.34339599387944]
  We create the first large publicly available high-quality dataset for named entity recognition in ten African languages. We detail characteristics of the languages to help researchers understand the challenges that these languages pose for NER.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-03-22T13:12:44Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.