AI in African agriculture: How patriarchal tech design excludes women farmers and deepens colonial data divides
Original framing: “Designing AI with women, not for them. Reflections from Africa Food Systems Forum 2026” — bing news
Women like *Dr. Wangari Maathai’s* successor, *Dr. Elizabeth Maruma Mrema*, have warned that AI in agriculture risks replicating the gendered violence of colonial land grabs. Rural women in Tanzania’s *Mbinga* region report that AI-driven extension workers (often male) dismiss their crop rotation knowledge as 'superstitious,' while corporate AI systems patent their seed varieties. The Forum’s 'reflections' include no quotes from these women, centering instead 'experts' from agribusiness or academia.
The African Food Systems Forum’s reflections on AI are a classic example of *solutionism*—treating technological integration as a neutral, apolitical fix for systemic inequalities.
By centering 'design with women' over structural critiques, the narrative obscures how AI replicates colonial and patriarchal power dynamics: extracting data from the Global South while concentrating benefits in the Global North, and displacing women’s labor under the guise of 'efficiency.' Historical patterns—from colonial land grabs to SAPs—show that without radical redistribution of data sovereignty, land rights, and energy access, AI will deepen, not mitigate, these injustices. The trickster figure of *Anansi* reminds us that true innovation requires unraveling these hidden threads, not just weaving new ones. Solutions must start with feminist and decolonial data governance, energy-democratic infrastructure, and the restoration of indigenous knowledge systems as the foundation—not the supplement—of agricultural technology.