The Problem

Across Africa and the wider Global South, we are told that algorithmic control, data extraction and economic precarity are the price of progress and cost of doing business.

Tech companies now act as private governments, deciding who can work, who can speak and how value is shared, with less oversight than any public institution. Workers are managed, rated and dismissed by systems they cannot see or question. Automated decisions on credit, welfare and policing reproduce old exclusions at new speed. Data generated by African users flows out to be monetised elsewhere. And the devices that power it all end their lives as e-waste, poisoning communities far from where they were used.

Technology is not neutral. It restructures work, redistributes power and reshapes what collective action is possible. The question is not whether technology will transform our societies, but who gets to decide how.

What We Believe

Just technology is accountable in four ways:

• Built: with the communities it affects, not merely for them.
• Owned: so that the value created by people’s data and labour flows back to them.
• Governed: democratically, with public oversight rather than terms of service.
• Accountable: with real redress when systems cause harm, and within ecological limits.

Governing technology is not about slowing or stopping progress. It is about deciding together what progress is for.

Where & How We Work

The digital frontier: algorithmic governance and AI regulation, platform and gig work, data justice, digital civic participation, and technology and data literacy.
The ecological frontier: e-waste and the environmental footprint of digital infrastructure.

Across both frontiers, we follow power: between employers and workers, corporations and communities, producers and those who bear environmental costs, and Global North consumption and Global South disposal.

Regulating tech companies is not enough. We ask what technological futures become possible when communities have genuine power over design and governance: data commons, public digital infrastructure and community-governed tools. These are alternatives worth building.

Whoever we work with, every engagement follows these commitments:

• The people we bring into the room are paid for their time and expertise.
• Participants hear what came of their contribution.
• We collect only the data we need, and communities have a say in how it is used.
• We retain the right to publish anonymised learning, because what we discover belongs to the public conversation.

What We Do

Research: We study how algorithmic systems actually work, and how they are experienced by the workers, users and communities living under them. Our participatory methods treat lived experience as evidence.

Policy and frameworks: We turn evidence into proposals for AI regulation, data governance and platform accountability that legislators, regulators and movements can use.

Building: We design and test civic technology that puts power in people’s hands. Our first product, Tujipange, built with our Civic Power Lab, helps Kenyans deliberate together towards a shared national agenda.

Convening: We bring technologists, regulators, workers, researchers and companies together in closed-door sessions to work through contested questions honestly, before decisions are locked in.

Decision Labs: When a government or company is about to deploy a system that will shape people’s lives, we bring the people it will affect into the room before it goes live.