PAIRSxAfrica will take place in Lusaka on 4 May 2026 from 8:30 am to 1:00 pm at the Raddison Blu Hotel, Lusaka. This is organised as an informal fringe event of RightsCon in Lusaka, Zambia.
**Register for PAIRSx Africa here.** Please note that due to the venue capacity, a limited number of tickets are available.
In 2025, the first PAIRSx Africa webinar was held alongside the Global AI Summit on Africa in Rwanda. The session brought together policy experts, practitioners, developers, and academics to advance the practice of participatory AI across Africa. It served as a critical point for defining Africa’s participatory needs and establishing a community capable of formulating a shared vision for policy action. This webinar culminated in an open statement to the Summit Co-Chairs, urging them to expand the conversation to address key areas that drafters and co-signers felt were insufficiently covered during the April 2025 Summit. These key areas included: Decent AI Jobs for Africa, Public Engagement and Participation in AI Governance, and Resourcing Participatory AI Development.
The second iteration of PAIRSxAfrica will be hosted in-person alongside RightsCon in Lusaka, Zambia, on 4 May 2026, under the theme: ‘Shaping African AI Through Participatory Governance and Design’.
RightsCon is the ideal venue for the first in-person PAIRSxAfrica. Rightscon convenes a rich and experienced global digital rights community. Furthermore, with "Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies" serving as one of the themes for this year's conference, the deliberations at PAIRS can directly inform and elevate discussions during the main event.
This is a space to advance both Participatory AI scholarship and practice across the African continent. PAIRSxAfrica brings together representatives from civil society, industry, and academia who are dedicated to advancing Participatory AI as a method for aligning AI in Africa with public interest needs and outcomes.
We aim to highlight existing studies, evidence, frameworks, and toolkits that demonstrate how African communities can directly shape AI governance and development, and how the concerns of skeptical groups can be leveraged generatively. Additionally, we seek to identify the research and evidence gaps that must be addressed to further advance participatory AI in Africa.
Building on the work that began in 2025 and on the themes that emerged from webinar in 2025, PAIRSxAfrica @ Rightscon will focus on advancing the following tracks:
Guiding question: How can AI governance be structured and institutionalised to ensure impacted African communities can meaningfully shape outcomes at national and local as well as global levels?
Whether at the African Union or within various African countries, practices referred to as "participatory" are often merely consultations or validation meetings. In these settings, the public or community members are invited to share opinions on governance decisions that have already been determined in their absence. While this approach seems ‘inclusive’, it fails to address fundamental challenges such as extractive data practices, the unequal distribution of benefits and harms, or the power disparities among participants (such as those between civil society and Big Tech lobbyists). There should not be a presumption of knowledge or understanding of AI use regarding an individual or community. Specifically, there should be a right to know when AI use affects decisions made in response to an individual or community.
This track aims to highlight participatory AI governance that empowers African communities to influence critical decisions regarding how AI is governed - locally, nationally, and globally. It seeks to move governance from tokenistic gestures toward meaningful practice. Additionally, this track will explore "clear avenues to effectively engage the public, movements, and civil society organisations in contributing to AI governance," as called for in the open statement to the conveners of the 2025 Global AI Summit on Africa.
Guiding question: How can those developing, designing and localising AI systems center the needs of African communities, without negating their historical and structural contexts?
The present day frontier AI models are developed outside of the continent, giving Africans very little opportunity to shape their technical artifacts or socio-economic impacts. This means more investment is needed to: 1. create datasets that fit the context and use the languages in different African countries, or 2. build small, task-specific algorithmic systems that meet the needs of African communities. This track aims to explore design-justice and community-based participatory methodologies that take into account the historical and structural injustices poising over technological design; especially regarding frontier AI models emerging from the US and China that are developed and designed to meet the needs and fit the context of those countries.
Guiding question: How can community refusal, contestations and critical engagement reshape AI development and governance in African countries?
Given the disruptiveness of AI, it is important to consider how existing forms of contestation and refusal can inform more just and context-sensitive pathways for its adoption. Various African communities; including data workers, epistemologists, and ethicists, have been sounding alarms regarding how AI affects labor practices, knowledge systems, and the values underpinning African societies.
While many African communities are facing strenuous economic conditions, these contestations and refusals of AI should not be dismissed because of a future which promises economic development. Rather, they should be viewed as the foundation of a negotiation practice that could redirect focus toward alternative AI technologies or governance frameworks. These practices can open space not only for alternative technological trajectories, but also for the recognition of diverse knowledge systems, cosmovisions, and governance traditions that have historically been excluded from dominant AI frameworks. Under this track, we apply a political economy analysis of AI, exploring how African values can be incorporated into its development, deployment, and management, while critically analysing the economic motivations guiding adoption of AI.
From this perspective, Participatory AI does not solely rest on universal ethical principles or rights-based approaches. It must be grounded in the meaningful inclusion of plural epistemologies and community-based governance models, particularly those of traditional communities.
PAIRSxAfrica will take place in Lusaka on 4 May 2026 from 8:30 am to 1:00 pm.
Register to attend here; please note that due to the venue capacity, a limited number of tickets are available.
If you have research or evidence that addresses the guiding questions under the tracks listed above, please share your proposal with [email protected]. We will get back to you during the week of 13 April.
We aim to foster a rich discussion about the ideas presented on the day and to inform further research. If you plan to attend, watch out for a "call for provocations".
To make a donation to support the running of PAIRSxAfrica, and similar events, please contribute via Open Collective.
Programme Chair: Kiito Shilongo
Programme committee