Alongside teaching, I also used my time at home to expand my reading. I immersed myself in both Eastern and Western literature — “The Useless Sex” by Oriana Fallaci, “The Handmaid’s Tale” again, “Girl, Wash Your Face” by Rachel Hollis, psychology books to reignite hope, spiritual writings like Rumi’s “Masnavi,” and history books such as “A History of the World” by Ernest Gombrich. I wanted to understand: Were there other nations in history who shared our fate? Or are we just blindly repeating the past? These books opened my eyes and broadened my perspective on life. Although the longing for formal education never left me, I continued to search for alternatives. Eventually, I found an online university in the U.S., the University of the People, where I could study for a bachelor’s degree if I met the requirements. I applied to the Business Administration program and, after a few months, received my acceptance letter. I'm set to begin my studies in April, and I’m beyond excited. Yet, I can’t help but feel a deep sorrow that so many other girls are still denied an education.


I wish they could also have the opportunity to study, if not in person, at least online. I’m lucky; my family has always supported and encouraged me. My father and mother have always told my sisters and me: “Study first, become independent, and then plan the rest of your life.” Without their support, I might have remained like thousands of other girls, silent, forgotten, sitting hopelessly in a corner of the house. But with their help, I reached a high level in English, got accepted to an American university, and, God willing, I will one day complete a master’s and even a doctorate. I dream that one day all families will recognize the importance of supporting and empowering their daughters. Now, when I look back at who I was three and a half years ago, I realize I’m not the same person. I’ve matured beyond my age, gained wisdom, and grown stronger. I’m ready to build a bright future, and I’ll step forward — stronger than ever — toward my goals and my dreams.


Ecuador’s Netanyahu and Trump supporters target Ecuadorian–Iranian Cultural Center

Operation Epic Fury, which the United States and Israel executed on the Islamic Republic of Iran in the early hours of February 28, 2026, left hundreds dead, including leading figures in the Islamic regime and women and children. Although this military assault occurred some 13,270 km from Ecuador, in Quito, the country’s capital, supporters of Israel’s and the United States’ leaders raided the Ecuadorian–Iranian Cultural Center, in the north of the city. They used sticks and pepper spray whilst shouting insults and threats. According to viral social media images, a group of people arrived outside the center in a caravan of cars at around 7:30 pm local time (GMT-5). The group, some of whom had sticks, were shouting at and threatening those inside, damaging property, causing panic and leaving two injured. This video reports how women and children were assaulted while praying in the Ecuadorian–Iranian Cultural Center in Quito. This is a direct consequence of the biased and dehumanizing narratives that turn foreign policy into fuel for hatred.


When the Foreign Office takes a stance siding with Israel, the United States, and their international terrorism, it also legitimizes violence at home. https://t.co/7aQ3er7Y1x pic.twitter.com/gKsGRir8fr — Elena Rodríguez Yánez (@ElenaDeQuito) March 1, 2026 Women, children, and older adults who were praying during Ramadan, were among the 35 people inside the property. At a press conference on March 3, 2026 , Jhadiya Nuñez, a member of the center's board, trembled as she described what she had experienced that weekend. She explained how she will never forget the fear she felt as the violence intensified that week. She also appreciated the solidarity shown on social media by Ecuador’s social organizations , citizens, and mass media. Following their violent raid, the aggressors threw the flag of the State of Israel into the cultural center as a symbolic message: a chessboard of war that transcends distance and borders. Far from being an isolated incident, the attack in Quito was an act of hatred facilitated by proximity . Unable to reach Iranian territory, violence broke out on the other side of the world.


This incident is a reminder that in the 21st century, wars no longer have defined frontlines. Battlefields can be anywhere those in power decide that a neighbor, due to their faith, ethnicity, or background, is an enemy. Ecuador’s relationship with Israel Ecuador’s foreign policy doesn’t stop at abstract statements. In February 2026, the Foreign Office announced its agenda to strengthen relations with Israel. An official visit from Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Gideon Sa'ar soon followed; his bilateral meeting with President Daniel Noboa resulted in the signing of a framework agreement to initiate negotiations on a future trade agreement and a security cooperation agreement between the Ministry of the Interior in both countries. This same alliance approach is reflected in President Noboa’s relationship with the U.S. government. He attended the Shield of the Americas Summit in Miami on March 7, 2026, which President Trump convened . The Ecuadorian Foreign Office framed this summit as a meeting of allied nations with shared principles that identify common threats to the Americas .


At the same time, amidst escalating tensions after the United States’ and Israel’s attacks on Iran, Ecuador’s Foreign Office released a statement expressing concern for the deteriorating security situation in the “Middle East.” It also condemned Iran’s offensive response against the region’s countries, recommending that Ecuadorians avoid travelling to this area and reaffirming its commitment to combating terrorism. When an external conflict violently enters a Cultural Center in Quito, the problem is no longer West Asia, but the rule of law. If foreign policy determines alliances, this approach, either by action or inaction, must not result in the social tolerance of faith, background, or identity-based harassment, which undermines democratic coexistence and turns civilians into military targets.


How initiatives to narrow Africa’s digital gap are affecting women’s representation

In Africa, several initiatives seek to increase women’s visibility in digital spaces. Africa Wiki Women is one of the projects actively involved in advancing African women’s participation in online knowledge creation and sharing. Women across the continent still face many obstacles in accessing technology and participating in digital knowledge spaces. Previous reports from Global Voices show that online abuse and harassment of women are significant barriers limiting their participation in and contribution to collaboration platforms and information networks. These obstacles lead to a representation bias , where African women’s achievements often remain unseen and undocumented in digital spaces. From these access barriers emerged Africa Wiki Women, a collaborative project between three women: Ruby Damenshie-Brown from Ghana, Bukola James from Nigeria, and Pellagia Njau from Tanzania, who came together to empower women through training, contribution campaigns, and mentorship programs . This organization encourages women to document the countless remarkable achievements African women make, and increase the content about women and their initiatives on collaborative knowledge platforms.


Africa Wiki Women aims to narrow the gap in women’s representation in the Wikimedia ecosystem and increase African women’s participation in online spaces. By fostering learning, collaboration, and leadership, Africa Wiki Women helps make more women’s voices heard in open knowledge creation. On International Women’s Day 2026 , Global Voices interviewed Ruby Damenshie-Brown, Co-Founder of Africa Wiki Women, to explain the group’s approach and its impact across the continent. Mamisoa Raveloaritiana (MR): What prompted you to found Africa Wiki Women? Ruby Brown (RB) : Lorsque j’ai rejoint la communauté Wikimedia en 2019, j’ai remarqué un écart frappant: la majorité des contributeurs étaient des hommes, et moins de 20 % des biographies sur la version anglophone de Wikipedia étaient consacrées à des femmes. Un grand nombre de ces articles ne comporte même pas d’images. Cela signifie que les histoires et les réalisations des femmes africaines étaient largement absentes sur Wikipedia. Cet écart est devenu encore plus évident lors d’un Edit-a-thon de 24 heures de Wiki Women in Red , où j’ai eu du mal à trouver suffisamment d’informations publiées pour écrire sur des femmes africaines notables.


C’était frustrant, mais aussi révélateur: il ne s’agissait pas seulement d’un problème de représentation, mais d’un problème systémique. La campagne Sheroes of Africa , une initiative qui met en lumière et valorise le rôle des femmes africaines, en avril 2022 a été un moment déterminé dans le développement, la culture, la politique et la transformation sociale du continent durant lequel les hommes dominaient la participation et la reconnaissance. Nous avons même dû réviser les critères du concours afin de pouvoir célébrer la contribution exceptionnelle d’une seule femme. Cette expérience a clairement montré la nécessité de créer un espace dédié où les femmes africaines pourraient être visibles, soutenues et valorisées. Partant d’expériences similaires dans le mouvement Wikimedia et d’un profond désir de créer un espace qui relie les femmes africaines au-delà des simples campagnes ponctuelles, mes cofondatrices et moi avons créé Africa Wiki Women: une communauté par et pour les femmes africaines, centrée sur le mentorat, la collaboration et une représentation équitable dans tous les aspects de l’écosystème Wikimedia, de la contribution éditoriale à la gouvernance.


L'objectif est de permettre aux femmes africaines de raconter leurs propres histoires, de développer des compétences de leadership grâce au mentorat et de participer activement, en tant que contributrices et dirigeantes, au mouvement Wikimedia. Il s’agit de transformer un manque de visibilité en un changement durable. Ruby Brown (RB) : When I joined the Wikimedia community in 2019, I noticed a striking gap. Most contributors were men, and less than 20 percent of the biographies on English Wikipedia were about women. A significant number of these articles don’t even include images, meaning African women’s stories and achievements were largely missing from Wikipedia. This gap became even more apparent during a 24-hour Wiki Women in Red edit-a- thon , where I struggled to find enough published information to write about remarkable African women. It was frustrating, but also eye-opening. It wasn’t just a representation problem, but a systemic one. In April 2022, when men dominated participation and recognition, the Sheroes of Africa campaign, an initiative that recognizes and highlights the role of African women, was a defining moment for the continent’s development, culture, politics, and social transformation. We even had to revise the contest criteria to celebrate the exceptional contribution of one woman.


This experience clearly demonstrated the need to create a dedicated space where African women could be visible, supported, and valued. Drawing on similar experiences in the Wikimedia movement and a strong desire to create a space that brings African women together beyond simple one-off campaigns, my co-founders and I created Africa Wiki Women. This is a community by and for African women, based on mentorship, collaboration, and equal representation in all aspects of the Wikimedia ecosystem, from editorial contributions to governance. The objective is to enable African women to tell their own stories, develop leadership skills through mentorship and active participation as contributors and leaders in the Wikimedia movement. This means turning a lack of visibility into sustainable change. RM: Why is it important that African women are represented on platforms like Wikipedia? RB : La représentation est essentielle, car la connaissance façonne le pouvoir. Wikipedia est souvent le premier point de référence pour des millions de personnes à travers le monde. Lorsque les femmes africaines sont absentes, cela envoie un message implicite: leurs expériences, leurs contributions et leur leadership seraient moins importants.


La représentation sur Wikipedia permet de corriger les déséquilibres historiques en documentant les réalisations de femmes qui ont souvent été négligées, et inspire les jeunes générations. Elle joue aussi un rôle important dans l’information des décisions et des politiques publiques. Lorsque les contributions des femmes sont visibles et documentées, elles peuvent être utilisées par les chercheurs, les journalistes et les décideurs. En somme, la représentation n’est pas seulement symbolique, elle est structurelle: elle garantit que le récit mondial reflète la réalité et que l’expertise et le leadership des femmes africaines soient reconnus et valorisés. RB : Representation is essential, as knowledge shapes power. Wikipedia is often the first point of reference for millions of people worldwide. When African women are absent, it sends an implicit message that their experiences, contributions, and leadership are less important. Representation on Wikipedia helps address historic imbalances by documenting the achievements of often-overlooked women and inspiring young generations. It also plays an important role in informing decisions and public policies. When women’s contributions are visible and documented, researchers, journalists, and decision makers can use them.


In essence, representation isn’t only symbolic, it’s structural. It ensures the global narrative reflects reality and that African women’s expertise and leadership are recognized and valued. RM: What impact has Africa Wiki Women had so far? RB : Depuis sa création, Africa Wiki Women a commencé à réduire l’écart de visibilité de manière significative. Plus de 500 femmes provenant de plusieurs pays africains ont été formées à la contribution sur Wikipedia et aux plateformes Wikimedia. Elles ont créé et amélioré des centaines d’articles, des profils de femmes leaders, des pages consacrées à des organisations et initiatives dirigées par des femmes. Au-delà des chiffres, l’impact est aussi personnel et transformateur. Nombreuses d'entre elles témoignent que leur implication leur a permis d'avoir une confiance en elles, de se reconnaître comme expertes dans leurs domaines et de défendre les histoires de leurs communautés. L'initiative ne se limite pas à produire du contenu: elle vise aussi le renforcement des capacités et l’autonomisation. Chaque contribution représente à la fois un enrichissement du savoir et un pas vers plus de visibilité et de reconnaissance.


RB : Since its creation, Africa Wiki Women has begun to narrow the visibility gap significantly. More than 500 women from various African countries have received training on contributing to the Wikipedia and Wikimedia platforms. They have created and improved hundreds of articles, profiles of female leaders, and pages on female-led organizations and initiatives. Beyond the figures, the impact is also personal and transformative. Many of them report how their involvement has enabled them to gain confidence in themselves, recognize themselves as experts in their field, and present their communities’ stories. The initiative is not limited to content production. It also aims to strengthen skills and autonomy. Each contribution simultaneously represents knowledge development and a step towards more visibility and recognition. RM: What are the main obstacles preventing African women from contributing to online knowledge platforms? RB : Plusieurs obstacles rendent la participation des femmes africaines à la création de savoir numérique plus difficile. L’un des premiers est l’accès à la technologie: toutes les femmes ne disposent pas d’un accès fiable à Internet ou à des appareils adaptés pour contribuer efficacement en ligne.


Il y a également la question de la littérature numérique. Même lorsque l’accès existe, certaines femmes manquent de confiance ou de compétences pour naviguer sur les plateformes comme Wikipedia ou Wikimedia Commons . Les contraintes de temps constituent un autre défi important. Beaucoup de femmes doivent concilier responsabilités familiales et travail, ce qui leur laisse peu de temps pour contribuer à des projets de connaissance ouverte. À cela s’ajoute le manque de représentation et de mentorat. Sans modèles visibles ou accompagnement, il peut être difficile pour les femmes de se percevoir comme contributrices ou expertes. Enfin, des barrières culturelles et systémiques persistent dans certaines communautés où le travail et le savoir des femmes sont moins reconnus ou moins documentés, ce qui complique la recherche de sources fiables nécessaires pour créer des articles. Pour lever ces obstacles, nous combinons formation, mentorat, mise à disposition de ressources et plaidoyer afin de rendre la participation plus accessible et significative. Dans cette optique, nous avons lancé plusieurs programmes communautaires visant à renforcer les compétences et à accroître la participation des femmes.


The art of the non-apology: A conversation with former Bangladesh Home Minister

Bangladesh’s political landscape has drastically changed since the student-led July 2024 rebellion . Thousands of then-ruling Awami League leaders and members have fled the nation since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s removal on August 5, 2024. While Hasina and a number of other high-ranking officials sought political asylum in India, others relocated primarily to the UK and US . The real challenge for the Awami League (AL) came in May 2025, when Muhammad Yunus-led interim government of Bangladesh banned the party altogether under the Anti-Terrorism Act . Nevertheless, AL has been carrying out its political activities from exile since its ousting, primarily through webinars, while maintaining visibility in Indian media through public remarks and interviews. Read more: Bangladesh Press Secretary urges India to halt facilitation of Hasina’s media campaign One of the most prominent figures among them is former Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal , who departed Bangladesh on the same day as Hasina and is currently living in Kolkata, India, at an undisclosed location.


On November 17, 2025, the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh (ICT) sentenced Kamal to death for crimes against humanity linked to the July uprising. The tribunal found him liable alongside former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, citing a systematic “failure to prevent” atrocities and an active role in abetting the violence that defined those weeks. The three-member panel, headed by Justice Golam Mortuza Mozumder, delivered the verdict after finding them guilty on multiple charges and also ordered the state to confiscate all properties owned by Sheikh Hasina and Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal and compensate the families of those injured and killed during the July uprising. After spending nearly nineteen months underground, Kamal has finally decided to speak out. In an in-person interview with Abhimanyu Bandyopadhyay at his private residence, Kamal discusses the legitimacy of the recent parliamentary elections, the possibility of a political dialogue with the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party ( BNP ), the legal issues that the Awami League leadership is facing, their current stay in India, allegations of state-led violence, and the administration’s role during the July-August protests.


Here are some excerpts from the interview: Abhimanyu Bandyopadhyay (AB): The BNP has recently formed a new government after winning the 13th National Parliamentary Elections. Many local and international observers rated this election to be fair. What do you think about the election results? Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal (AKK): It was a total sham. As per our ground reports, in many places, ballot boxes were being stuffed the night before voting even started. BNP and the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party had received voting slips in advance to manipulate the outcome. How else do you explain Jamaat-e-Islami, a party that on average gets no more than a dozen seats, leaping to 68? The National Citizens Party (NCP) barely had enough public support to win anything, yet even some of their members got “elected” thanks to this fraud. All of this was to make sure Dr. [Muhammad] Yunus ended up as President, no matter the cost. The Interim government knew very well that if [The Amani League] got to participate in the elections, we would again secure a landslide victory.


Take a look at the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI)’s pre-election survey report. It clearly says that 51 percent of the Bangladeshis still favor the Awami League. [ Editor’s note: This claim lacks credibility, as no public record exists of such a survey by DGFI.] That’s the only reason they didn’t let us take part. Otherwise, there is not a single instance in which the Awami League has refused to participate in an election. For now, all I can say is that we will keep an eye on every move made by this new administration. Read more: The paradox of Bangladesh’s democratic rebirth: A critical analysis of the 2026 election’s promise and pitfalls AB: What do you expect from the current administration, particularly since they refuse to lift the ban on the Awami League? AKK: It is a deeply regressive stance for any administration claiming to be democratic. This very political party once tried to assassinate Sheikh Hasina in the brutal grenade attack of August 21, 2004 . Twenty-four of our leaders, including Ivy Rahman, were killed in that blast.


Those wounds haven’t healed yet. Yet, despite enduring such violence, we never banned the BNP’s political activities. We gave them a political space, which they are now denying us. What did the BNP–Jamaat alliance era bring to Bangladesh except open support for extremism? In 2005, right under their noses, militants carried out a series of bomb blasts across 63 districts. Now, the same political mindset talks about governance while continuing to exclude others? This is absurd. We expect this government to look at its own history, rethink its choices, and reopen the political space for us. At this point, their biggest task is to stabilize the country. Bangladesh’s law and order have totally collapsed under the interim administration. Citizens no longer feel safe, and the economy is shaky. If they truly wish to govern, they should end the persecution and focus on protecting people and their livelihoods. AB: Is your party willing to engage in direct talks with the BNP leadership about reconciliation? AKK: We have always believed that dialogue is the only viable path forward for any democracy.


We did not come to power through the barrel of a gun, nor do we seek to hold on to it by any undemocratic means. So, yes, we are definitely willing to engage in talks with them. But such discussions need a genuinely democratic environment. If the BNP leadership insists on keeping us at arm’s length, honestly, there’s not much more we can do. AB: The BNP leadership recently stated that proceedings against the Awami League members will continue legally. Are you and your party leaders ready to go to Bangladesh and face these charges in court? AKK: Our Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has always said that she wishes to return and fight these battles through legal means. She has always led from inside Bangladesh, sticking to the rule of law no matter how tough things get. Look at the trial for the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman . If she had chosen to, she could have easily set up a fast-track, special tribunal, but she insisted on proceeding under the country’s existing legal framework.


The Awami League doesn’t walk away from the battlefield. It’s hard not to notice what’s happening to our courts right now. The International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) Bangladesh was originally established by Bangabandhu (Sheikh Mujibur Rahman) to bring the war criminals of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide to justice. Under the Yunus administration, this court has been fundamentally misused. Through a series of arbitrary legal amendments, people who died in entirely different circumstances are being brought under its jurisdiction and described as martyrs. The court itself is illegitimate. There was no war, no genocide here. So how can these cases be framed as war crimes? That said, we remain fully prepared to engage in any legal process. But for that to happen, the judicial system needs reform to restore its independence and neutrality. AB: You have been sentenced to death by the ICT . Since you said that this court is illegitimate, do you have any plans to send a legal representative to challenge the validity of your conviction and the jurisdiction of this tribunal?


AKK: The structure of this tribunal leaves no room for representation. Unless one appears in person, there is effectively no way to contest proceedings. Once arrested under this system, you will not be able to get out on bail. It is a closed loop designed for a specific outcome. So, we urge the current government to uphold the law and dismantle this kangaroo court. We want the Awami League to be able to return to Bangladesh in a legal way. AB: You said no genocide happened during the July Revolution. Are you rejecting the allegations of genocide entirely? AKK: Of course I am. This narrative is entirely a part of that meticulously designed plan orchestrated by Muhammad Yunus and his cronies. Under Bangladeshi law, any incident in which a police officer uses lethal force is subject to a judicial inquiry led by a magistrate. This investigation figures out why the officer took lethal action and what was happening at the time. When we were in charge, we set up a judicial inquiry commission to investigate all reported killings.


This included deaths caused by police, the killing of police personnel, and the deaths of civilians and political activists, irrespective of party affiliation. No individual was granted indemnity. The interim government has done none of this. Instead, they immediately issued an ordinance granting impunity to anyone for the killing of all police officers and all Awami League activists. AB: The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has reported that nearly 1,400 people were killed during the 2024 uprising. How can you dismiss a figure documented by an international body of that stature? AKK: You have to look at where these numbers are coming from. Our own findings indicate that approximately 260 people were killed during the uprising in Bangladesh, including police officers, civilians, protesters, and even Awami League activists. Later on, the Health Department under the interim government had said that nearly 600 people were killed during the uprising. Soon, they changed that number to 800 (approximately). The figure of 1,400 appears to originate from an individual assessment rather than a formally mandated UN inquiry.


Under established procedures, any fact-finding report must be authorized by the Human Rights Council and accompanied by an approved budget. This report had neither. It carries no official UN document number. I think the United Nations should look into this matter much more deeply and make a neutral report that includes a proper list of all the people who died during the protests. AB: You were the home minister during the July protests. Are you taking responsibility for what your government did? AKK: We are deeply saddened for the people who died during the protests. It is possible that mistakes were made on our side; it is also possible that mistakes were made on theirs, too. That is something open to discussion. If it is proven that we made mistakes, we will definitely take responsibility. But we must also be given the space to present the facts from our side. By mid-July, when the protest shifted from the quota movement to a one-point demand , the level of violence unleashed was beyond explanation.


On August 3, a police officer informed me that the protesters were using weapons that our police had never seen before. Many of the guns were not licensed. In such a moment, if the police shoot back to protect themselves, should that be viewed as an offensive act or an act of self-defense? I clearly remember toward the end of July, the prime minister personally met family members of those who had died in the protests, expressed her sorrow, and offered financial support. We had said there would be an investigation through legal channels into the killings, but we were not given the opportunity to carry that process through. AB: You are making a very serious charge, Mr. Khan. Are you claiming that thousands of ordinary students and the general public who took to the streets during July were all carrying prohibited, high-caliber weapons? AKK: I did not refer to the ordinary students or the general public. What I meant to say was that among a section of the protesters, there were militants involved.


See, we understand that many of the young people who came out in July genuinely sought reform. They have been tragically exploited for specific political interests. To expand the list in the so-called July martyrs’ gazette, the interim administration even included the names of those miscreants who were killed in police firing while attacking our officers, looting police stations, outposts, and armories, and setting them ablaze. The list also includes those killed in security force firing while attempting to escape from prison or during attacks on prisons. The list also includes those who died in fires they started while looting and burning homes and businesses of Awami League leaders and activists. AB: During the protests, several unarmed civilians were killed by sniper fire, with shots reportedly aimed at the forehead. Did your administration allow the use of snipers? AKK: Our police have around fifty sniper rifles, all of which came from the United States for counterterrorism operations. They were locked up during the protests and stayed locked even on the day we departed.


The army has a few sniper rifles as well, but those were not in use at that time either. Brigadier Sakhawat Hossain has confirmed that theirs too remained locked. We simply do not know where the sniper rifles came from and who these marksmen were, but their presence indicates outsider involvement with an intent to foment violence and create instability across Bangladesh. AB: So no shots were fired at protesters from helicopters? AKK: Our helicopters are too small to carry out targeted firing; at most, random fire would be possible. During the protests, sound grenades were dropped from helicopters to create loud blasts and clear the ground below. AB: But according to leaked audio verified by the BBC , Sheikh Hasina had ordered the use of lethal force against the protesters. AKK: That is an incomplete reading of the situation. The prime minister’s instruction was directed at armed militants, not at unarmed civilians or peaceful demonstrators. In Bangladesh, the police follow a set of rules when dealing with protests. First, they give warnings. Then move to physical restraint if necessary.


If that fails, they may use tear gas and rubber bullets. Live ammunition is considered only in extreme circumstances, when there is serious destruction of public property, loss of life, or direct attacks on law enforcement. In such an extreme situation, even a regular constable has the legal standing to defend his life if no one is in charge. During our time in government, the police were granted operational authority, but they were also kept under strict supervision. Our police would not have dared to fire on anybody without a good reason. AB: What would you say about the death of Abu Sayeed ? Footage shows that he was an unarmed protester holding a stick; however, the police shot him several times. Were they ordered to forget those “rules” at that time? AKK: [Hesitates] Thank you, next question, please. AB: How long do you plan to stay in India? Have you thought about leaving for another country? AKK: We are deeply grateful to the Indian government for the way it has welcomed us and offered us shelter.


No other country could have offered us a safer refuge than India. AB: BNP’s General Secretary Mirza Fakhrul said that Sheikh Hasina won’t be a problem for India-Bangladesh relations. If ties deepen in the future between the BNP-led government and New Delhi, could that create difficulties for members of the Awami League currently taking refuge in India? AKK: I think this is something we can only wait and see about. We cannot say for sure what will happen. But one thing is certain: India is our friend, and they have always helped the Awami League. I think they will keep supporting us no matter what happens. AB: You have alleged many times that your removal from power was a conspiracy orchestrated by the American deep state. But the Indian government maintains very close relations with the United States and is often seen as aligned with it. Does that put you in a potentially difficult position? AKK: I do not want to comment on what the Indian government does. What I can say is that India has been a friend to us.


In moments of crisis, they have stood by us and have assured us of their continued support. That is all that matters to us. AB: As Bangladesh’s largest political party, how do you believe the Awami League can re-enter the country’s political landscape ? AKK: At this moment in Bangladesh, even mentioning the Awami League can lead to imprisonment. We have seen a Deputy Inspector General (DIG) in Rajshahi publicly issue a letter stating that any of our members who manage to get bail would be arrested again under new charges. It is hard to imagine such a statement being made without instructions from higher authorities. We were fortunate to escape with our lives, but for those who have been detained, the conditions are unthinkable. Around 120 of our MPs are currently in prison . Information reaching me suggests that, across the country, a large proportion of detainees are Awami League activists and supporters. We are getting reports of physical assaults in custody and of prisoners being denied proper medical treatment. So, without changes to the judiciary, it will be difficult for us to return.


Even in the Liberation War [1971], we didn’t see this much inhuman treatment of us. If this continues, the people of Bangladesh will not remain silent. I believe it is ultimately our grassroots workers and supporters who will bring the party back to the country. AB: If you were to return to Bangladesh and eventually assume power again, what approach would you take toward the leaders of the July uprising? AKK: First, we want to express our sincere regret for those killed or injured during the July protests. Any future government led by us would initiate a thorough and independent investigation into why these events unfolded the way they did, who orchestrated them, what their intentions were, and what forces were at play. At the same time, we are prepared to examine our own errors. We need to understand whether any misjudgments on our part contributed to the unrest, and who may have been responsible for misleading the public during that period. All of this will be done transparently, through democratic and accountable processes. People deserve to know the truth.


Interactive map honors LGBTQ+ people’s historic presence in Prague

In the Czech Republic, the debate on LGBTQ+ people’s rights oscillates between a tolerant rhetoric towards this community and exploitation by predominantly right-wing politicians, who consider the gender issue as something foreign, if not a violation of local traditions. However, as shown in an interactive map of Prague, listing historical figures and places associated with this community, LGBTQ+ people have always been part of Czech culture. Homophobic rhetoric under the pretext of political protectionism In Central and Eastern Europe, which remains more marred by homophobia than Western Europe, where LGBTQ+ activism has been changing attitudes and laws since the 1980s, the Czech Republic is considered a comparatively more tolerant country . Progressive narratives on gender issues in the inter-war period, and one of Europe’s lowest levels of religiosity (about 20 percent of believers ), may explain why. But this is not to say Czech LGBTQ+ people are protected equally by law or on the streets. Although homosexual relationships, condemned during the communist era, were decriminalized in 1961 and registered partnerships were passed in 2006, parliament has refused to ratify the marriage bill for same-sex couples, despite positive changes to inheritance rights in 2024. That said, almost two-thirds of Czechs support the bill’s approval.


However, according to a study conducted in 2024, more than 40 percent of Czechs belonging to this community report instances of verbal or physical abuse. In more than 90 percent of cases, victims do not file complaints. The most serious homophobia probably comes from politicians. They don't hesitate in making public homophobic statements in a country that is a member of the European Union and, therefore, bound to anti-discrimination legislation under Article 21 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. As reported in this Global Voices article , leading figures, such as former president Miloš Zeman , former prime minister Petr Fiala , and Senator and presidential candidate Pavel Fischer , have made public discriminatory remarks without any consequences . They often present gender diversity as a “cultural import” from Brussels or the United States. A recent incident emphasized the culture of impunity toward some politicians. Minister of Foreign Affairs Petr Macinka from the far-right party Motorists for Themselves , who attended the Munich Security Conference in February 2026, clashed with former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on gender. He said : There is male, and female, and the rest, probably, is a social construct.This [the issue of gender] is something that went too far.


The medieval roots of Prague’s queer scene It was in light of this disregard that the Czech LGBTQ+ activist group and NGO , Společnost Pro Queer Pamět (Society for Queer Memory), launched an initiative, educating citizens about the ancient, vibrant history of LGBTQ+ people’s presence in Czech culture. In February 2022, the NGO launched an online interactive map of Prague, called Queer Prague , listing places where LGBTQ+ people lived and worked, as well as locations with monuments associated with this community. This guide, first published in print in 2014, features 160 points that, when clicked, open information pages explaining the cultural and historical context of LGBTQ+ people or places. The famous Republic Square, Náměstí Republiky , once named Josef Square during the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, in the historic center of the city, was known as a “cruising area,” a public meeting place for gay men: Ladislav Jackson , a representative for the NGO, explained the project’s origin and development in an interview with Global Voices: Všechno začalo v roce 2009, kdy se konala vůbec první mezioborová konference Homosexualita v české vědě, kde se setkalo významné množství historiků, historiček, historiků a historiček kultury, umění a literatury.


Výsledkem byly tři akademické knihy, které pak historik Jan Seidl navrhl přetvořit v praktický průvodce po Praze s názvem Teplá Praha (anglicky Queer Prague). Kniha se záhy vyprodala, tak jsme přistoupili k vytvoření on-line verze. Místa jsou tedy jakákoli místa, o kterých víme, že byla nějakým způsobem spojena s minulostí queer osob, historií queer emancipace a queer kultury. Nejstarší místo je z roku 1376, kdy je zaznamenán vůbec první soudní případ homosexuálního chování, šlo ale o násilné, zavrženíhodné akty. Pak je tam několik příběhů z dob novověku, většina událostí je ale z první poloviny 20. století. It all started in 2009, at the first Interdisciplinary Conference on Homosexuality in Czech Science, which brought together historians of art, culture, and literature. It resulted in three academic works, which the historian Jan Seidl suggested transforming into a practical guide for Prague titled ‘Queer Prague.’ As the book quickly flew off the shelves, we created an online version. The places mentioned are all those that we know are somehow associated with LGBTQ+ people’s history, their emancipation, and queer culture.


The oldest place dates back to 1376, the year of the first recorded homosexuality trial, involving violent and reprehensible acts. Then there are modern-day stories, but most of the events happened in the first half of the 20th century. For Jackson, the most interesting points on the map are those associated with two leading Czech artists, Jan Zrzavý and Toyen : Ukazují totiž, že queer minulost nejsou jen tragické příběhy a příběh ze soudních spisů, ale velmi komplexní svědectví o tom, jak lidi v minulosti dokázali svou jinakost předávat prostřednictvím umění a současně nacházet strategie, jak žít relativně šťastné životy. They show how the queer past isn’t just about tragic stories and judicial archives, but also about complex accounts of how people once expressed their otherness through art, finding strategies to live relatively happy lives. Bohužel už pak ale lidé neznají konkrétní příběhy, významné osobnosti, které se o to odtrestnění a další narovnávání práv zasloužili, jak se queer lidem žilo, čemu čelili v Rakousku-Uhersku, za tzv. první republiky, během druhé světové války, za státního socialismu. Jak se narovnávala práva hned po revoluci v roce 1989.


Co všechno to pro queer lidi znamenalo. I v dnešní době je queer historie zásadní, protože je instrumentální v udržování a rozšiřování/narovnávání občanských a lidských práv LGBTIQ+ osob. Ukazuje totiž, že queer lidé tu byli vždycky a jsou všude, nejde o žádnou novinku a rozmařilost zkažené doby. Bez queer historie, muzeálního a archivního uchovávání se žádná vyspělá společnost neobejde Unfortunately, people often don’t know much about the lives of the influential figures who fought for decriminalization and equal rights, focusing on their daily lives and the challenges they faced in the Austro-Hungarian era under the First Republic (1918–1948), during the Second World War, and under the socialist regime (1948–1989). People also know little about the rights advancements after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and what they meant. Today, queer history remains vital as it plays an instrumental role in maintaining and expanding LGBTQ+ people’s civic and human rights. It shows that queer people have always been there and are everywhere. This phenomenon isn’t new or a remnant of an immoral era. No developed society can forget about queer history and its preservation in museums and archives.


China catches ‘lobster fever’ as cloud companies embrace OpenClaw

China’s latest five-year plan , released in early March 2026, reasserts its goal of leading in artificial intelligence (AI) development by 2030 through its “ AI+ ” initiative, which fosters the integration of AI across all major economic sectors. While it is too soon to predict the outcome of the AI race, AI adoption in China is increasingly visible beyond the tech sector as usage among regular citizens has exploded with the emergence of OpenClaw . Released in November 2025, OpenClaw is an open-source and locally run AI agent developed by Austrian coder Peter Steinberger. Once set up on a computer, the virtual assistant can connect to LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude and perform tasks such as replying to emails, managing calendars, booking hotels, and managing social media accounts. Users can also install “skills” from platforms such as ClawHub to add new functions, such as controlling electronic appliances. After the Austrian programmer joined OpenAI and moved his OpenClaw project to an open-source foundation in mid February 2026, major Chinese cloud companies rushed to create their own version of “claw.”


Around February 2025, Chinese social media exploded with promises that OpenClaw would revolutionize users’ daily lives — claiming that regular citizens could now create their own AI agents to handle their work and grow their businesses. Inspired by OpenClaw’s lobster logo, users coined the phrase “raising a lobster” (養龍蝦) to promote the adoption of the AI agent. The phrase quickly went viral and helped spur its adoption. However, in less than a month, many have woken up from the “lobster fever” in the face of the harsh reality that creating a local AI agent is often too time-consuming, difficult, and expensive for non-technical people. Claw adoption in China In March, Tencent launched a Clawbot on WeChat that allows users to manage email, calendar, and files via natural language in chatrooms. It also launched “Work Buddy,” a desktop version of OpenClaw, and “QClaw,” a one-click installation of “claw” on mobile devices. Alibaba, a massive Chinese e-commerce platform, launched “Wukong,” a platform that connects to various AI agents to handle complex business tasks such as research, editing, and documentation. Baidu, JD.com, and others also introduced their own versions of “lobster.”


To promote the new AI features, these tech giants hosted physical meetups in early March to help students and their corporate fans set up OpenClaw on their desktops. News sites and social media platforms were flooded with footage of crowds outside Tencent and Baidu’s headquarters, hyping up “lobster fever.” Moreover, many cities, including tech hubs in Shenzhen and Wuxi, have added fuel to the craze by announcing subsidies of CNY 2 to 10 million (approximately USD 290,000 to 1.4 million) to attract startups and developers working on open-source projects. Across Chinese social media platforms, OpenClaw fans presented the “lobster” as an efficient assistant, capable of performing complex tasks such as video editing, responding to customer inquiries, reviewing and grading student assignments, and tra ding stocks around the clock with simple, natural-language instructions. Some influencers even claimed that AI agents will eventually replace computer applications and urged their followers to jump on the trend before it is too late. Lobster fever has driven many to upgrade their hardware, to the point that computers equipped with advanced chips, such as the Mac Mini, were temporarily out of stock in some cities.


On shopping platforms, tens of thousands of OpenClaw textbooks have been sold in a month, and some tech-savvy individuals have made substantial profits by providing online assistance to help newbies install and train their AI agents. However, as more and more people have picked up the tool, they have faced the harsh reality about the cost of “raising a lobster.” A tech-blogger, Yuan Guoxing, spelled out ordinary users’ frustration on Weibo: Do you think installing ‘Lobster’ is like hiring an employee who works for you 24/7? In reality, you’ll have to spend a ton of time training that useless lobster. Most importantly, you’ll have to work like a dog to raise it. The whole thing could be the biggest irony of 2026. Many people think running ‘Lobster’ is free. This is too naive. First, you need to set up a home for the lobster: it crashes on an average machine like your PC; you need to spend at least CNY 4,300 (USD 675) on a Mac Mini, which is sold out everywhere. If hosting it on a cloud server, you need to spend CNY 50–200 (USD 7–29) per month — and that’s just the lobster’s housing rent.


The real money-eater is the lobster’s food — that is, tokens. AI doesn’t eat food — it eats tokens. Using a cheap domestic large language model costs CNY 30–80 (USD 4.3–11.6) a month, barely enough to keep it alive; if you want to do some real work, it costs tens or even hundreds of yuan a day; using top-tier models like ChatGPT costs hundreds of yuan a day — possibly tens of thousands a month. […] If you install a lobster, you worry you can’t afford raising it; if you don’t, you’re afraid of being left out [of the market]. What’s an ordinary person supposed to do? A token is the smallest unit of data that an AI model processes or generates, and users must pay for it. Since March, token consumption by Chinese LLMs has surpassed that of U.S. models thanks to lobster fever. If a user chooses to run an AI agent on a cloud server, they must pay a monthly fee for the service. Raising lobsters means feeding the development of Chinese LLMs and AI platforms.


In addition to cost, AI users must be skilled at communicating with the lobsters, or the AI agent might be misled by inaccurate prompts, leading it to delete emails and files en masse and leak personal or even business secrets in chats and emails. Reportedly , some anxious newbies had to pay extra to remove the AI agent from their devices. Even state-funded media outlets found the “lobster fever” overblown and intervened to cool it down, as the current marketing narrative has fuelled a widespread anxiety that ordinary people will be left out of the job market and the technology-driven economy unless they master AI agents. Chinese authorities also stepped in to warn users about potential security risks, including malicious skill plugins and prompt-injection attacks embedded in malicious websites, which can manipulate AI agents into performing unauthorized tasks. This has driven many users to switch to Chinese lobster versions and platform services, which are perceived as safer or more controlled options. While most media outlets see the “lobster fever” as further proof of China’s success in creating a profitable model for AI technology, whether such “ tokenomics ” can sustain and boost domestic consumption remains uncertain. For ordinary people, popular Weibo user Fan Deng’s advice seems more than appropriate: 养龙虾，不如先养好自己。 Instead of raising a lobster, take care of yourself first.


Africa has 2,000 languages. AI content moderation covers fewer than 20

Bereket Tsegay spent his days watching videos he did not understand. He was hired to moderate content on TikTok at the company’s Kenya hub, one of the main centers for AI-assisted content review across Africa. He spoke Amharic , Ethiopia’s official language. But the videos in his queue came from across the continent in languages like Luo , Dholuo , Kikuyu , Dinka , and dozens more. When nothing in the visuals looked obviously wrong, and nobody had reported the video, he usually left it up. When it had been reported many times, he took it down. He has since left the job, and he is candid about what he saw: the system was doing its best with almost no real understanding of the content it was judging. His account, reported in the Christian Science Monitor in March 2026, is one snapshot of a much wider problem. Africa has more than 2,000 languages . The AI systems that moderate content across the continent were built primarily on English-language data, with some coverage of a handful of global languages.


A 2025 study , “The State of Large Language Models for African Languages,” comparing major language models found that only 42 African languages appear in any meaningful way across the systems reviewed. Just four languages, Amharic, Swahili, Afrikaans, and Malagasy, are handled with any degree of consistency. That leaves more than 98 percent of Africa’s languages essentially invisible to the moderation systems that decide what stays up and what gets removed. The consequences fall on real people. The language of the algorithm Jackson Busolo is a Kenyan TikTok creator who posts in Swahili, mostly about politics. One morning in February 2025, he woke up, and his account was gone. No warning, no explanation. He appealed, and eventually the account was reestablished. He never found out why it was taken down or restored. His case is not unusual. According to TikTok’s Q1 2025 Community Guidelines Enforcement data, as reported by Business Daily Africa , between January and March 2025, TikTok removed more than 450,000 videos from Kenya alone and banned over 43,000 accounts. By the second quarter, removals had climbed to 592,000.


The platform attributes most of this to automated systems. TikTok told the Christian Science Monitor that it uses a combination of technology and human moderation across many languages and is constantly expanding its coverage. But the platform declined to say which African languages its AI moderation tools actually cover. When a moderation system cannot process a language, it is less likely to flag content for human review. Instead, it relies on indirect signals such as user reports, visual cues, or audio patterns from languages it does recognize. Mercy Mutemi, executive director of the Oversight Lab , a Kenyan legal advocacy group focused on technology, put it plainly. She said: We are talking about an algorithm trained predominantly in English, being trusted to take down harmful content, while a huge percentage of TikTok users in Kenya are using TikTok in their mother tongue. The problem is not only false positives, but also content that gets removed when it should not. There are false negatives too: harmful content in languages the system cannot parse, which stays up because nothing in the video triggers a review.


In Ethiopia, false claims circulating on Facebook alleged that Ethiopian troops had seized Eritrea’s Red Sea port, spreading widely before being debunked by fact-checkers . Researchers have documented the same dynamic repeatedly. Swahili hate speech goes undetected. Moderation gaps in low-resource languages such as Hausa. Local language posts are misclassified by systems trained primarily on English. Ethnographic research with UX practitioners across six African countries found that large language models trained predominantly on English often struggled with African language input. In one example, including even a single Yorùbá word in an otherwise English prompt produced inaccurate outputs, ranging from partial mistranslations to unrelated responses, highlighting limitations in how these models handle multilingual and culturally specific text. What happens when that same model is asked to judge whether a post violates community standards? Who bears the cost? The burden of a moderation system that cannot read African languages is not shared equally. It falls hardest on creators, journalists, and ordinary users who communicate in those languages.


For creators, it means building an audience in a context where the algorithm is indifferent to the actual content of your work and responsive mainly to English-language signals. Pauline Onyango, another Kenyan creator, found that months of posting in the Luo language produced almost no algorithmic traction. Her content was effectively invisible. This is not only a fairness problem. It shapes what gets made, what gets amplified, and whose stories reach audiences. For journalists and civil society, it means that disinformation in African languages can gain more traction. Platforms with hundreds of millions of users on the continent are slower to act on harmful content in languages their systems cannot parse. Fact-checkers interviewed by Poynter described spending hours manually tracking Amharic-language Facebook posts during periods of political tension in Ethiopia, doing work that should have been caught by the platform’s systems. For platforms themselves, there is a compliance dimension that has gone largely undiscussed. The EU AI Act , which entered into force in August 2024, requires that AI systems be non-discriminatory and that training data be representative of the populations the system will affect.


The Digital Services Act (DSA), already in force since February 2024, requires platforms to explain content moderation decisions to affected users. If a system cannot identify the language a post is written in, it cannot produce a meaningful explanation for why that post was removed. These are not hypothetical future obligations. They apply now to any platform with European users, and African-language communities are present and active in Europe. What is actually being done? There is work happening, but it is scattered and chronically under-resourced. Research groups like AfricaNLP , a workshop series affiliated with major computational linguistics conferences, are producing multilingual datasets, benchmarks, and models for African languages. The 2025 AfricaNLP workshop included work on hate speech detection in Hausa and Igbo, Swahili news classification, and speech recognition for low-resource languages. Academic teams at universities in Pretoria, Nairobi, and Addis Ababa are building training data for languages that have almost none. Some commercial efforts are following. Cohere , a Canadian artificial intelligence company that develops large language models, partnered with HausaNLP to integrate African language datasets into its multilingual Aya model .


The data-labeling industry, worth an estimated USD 2.8 billion globally, relies heavily on workers in Kenya, Nigeria, and other African countries to annotate the data that AI systems learn from. Those same workers rarely see their languages reflected in the outputs of the systems they help train. The African Union’s Continental AI Strategy , approved in July 2024, commits to a people-centric approach and names data sovereignty as a priority. The AU’s strategy and the national AI strategies that followed it, including Nigeria’s in April 2025, flag linguistic diversity as something that needs addressing. But strategy documents are not models. They do not, on their own, close the gap between what systems can do and what the continent's languages require. The data-labeling industry relies heavily on workers in countries like Kenya to annotate what AI systems learn. Those same workers rarely see their languages reflected in the systems they help train. A fixable problem that nobody has decided to fix The language gap in AI content moderation is not a mystery.


It is a known problem with a known cause: the economics of building AI systems have historically favored languages with large amounts of digital text, and most African languages have very little. English dominates. French, Chinese, and Arabic have some coverage. Everything else is marginal. What makes this moment different is that the regulatory pressure is building from outside Africa in ways that might finally force change. The EU AI Act’s non-discrimination obligations apply to training data. If a system is trained on data that does not represent the populations it will serve, deployers face potential compliance exposure. The DSA’s transparency requirements mean platforms need to explain their decisions, including decisions made by systems that may have guessed rather than understood. None of this automatically fixes the problem. But it creates, for the first time, financial consequences for ignoring it. Platforms that have treated African-language coverage as a nice-to-have rather than a core requirement may find that position harder to sustain when regulators can ask for disaggregated performance data across languages and communities.


There is also an argument that does not depend on regulation at all. Africa is one of the fastest-growing regions for social media use. The platforms that want to grow on the continent over the next decade need to actually work for the people who live there. A moderation system that treats Swahili, Yoruba, and Amharic as edge cases is not a system designed for an African audience. It is a system designed for someone else, deployed in Africa. That is a gap worth naming plainly. Not because naming it is enough, but because the first step to fixing a problem is deciding it is, in fact, a problem rather than an acceptable trade-off. Disclosure: The author builds content moderation technology. The views and analyses in this article are his own and are drawn from publicly available research. Pride Chamisa is an AI researcher and the founder of VidSentry, an AI platform building context-aware video moderation tools for African-language content. He is based in Cape Town and is a GradStar Top 100 recipient.


African creators struggle to secure decent income in gig economy

In less than a decade, Africa has become one of the most dynamic environments for growth in the global creative economy . Driven by a young demographic , fast-growing smartphone adoption, and an audiovisual and music culture that’s enjoyed worldwide, thousands of digital creators have emerged in Lagos, Accra, Dakar, Lomé, and Nairobi. However, there is an economic gap between the creators’ works and their income. Creators left behind despite a growing market Nearly 85 percent of workers on the continent work in the informal sector , also known as the gig economy , where they engage in short-term, flexible jobs as a means of survival. Understanding what West Africa’s digital creators experience means assessing the gap between what they create and what they earn from it. The Africa Creator Economy Report 2.0 , published by Communiqué and TM Global at the Africa Creators Summit in Lagos in January 2026, observed that the African creator economy is worth USD 3 billion today , with projections of over USD 17 billion by 2030.


The report also found that 60 percent of African creators earn less than USD 100 per month from their digital work, while 54 percent earn less than USD 62 per month. These are the individuals who create Afrobeat tracks that Spotify pushes to the top of the global charts, Instagram images that reach Parisian trend agencies, and popular short-form content on TikTok that is replicated elsewhere without any credit or compensation. One role is no longer enough Kofi Dotse is a Ghana-based travel writer, content creator, and creative producer who grew up in Accra. He hoped to become a producer, which he ultimately achieved, as well as being a content creator, editor, trade negotiator, and, since 2025, a trainer. In an episode of his podcast Hors Script (Unscripted), “From Labor to Value… The Premium Creative Blueprint,” recorded in English in early 2026, he gave a detailed explanation of the process that shaped him: Looking at the current ecosystem, you cannot appear to have just one hat, so a lot of creatives have had to take on several roles within the space.


However, despite accumulating all these skills, platform payouts are unpredictable, and the algorithmic compensation is largely disconnected from their efforts. Local brands, under budgetary pressure themselves, also seek to get as much as possible for as little as possible. As for consumers, the Africa Creator Economy Report states that 78 percent of young Africans spend very little on digital cultural experiences, due to a significant lack of buying power rather than their disinterest. Although creative work is free-flowing, it fails to monetize at the rate of its distribution. According to the same report, the most stable creators now get 25 percent of their income from digital products, digital courses, and e-books, and 14 percent from merchandising. This accounts for much more than the direct payments from platforms like Spotify or YouTube. What’s more, skills development comes at a cost. Every hour spent learning about rights management or accounting is an hour taken away from the creative process itself. Skillfulness works like an invisible tax levied on talent. It is exhausting and, for most who are unable to manage, causes ongoing insecurity without contracts or social protection.


When money can’t cross borders Stripe is a global financial services platform unavailable in almost all francophone Sub-Saharan African countries. The PayPal payment platform is partially available, though withdrawals are restricted. For creators based in Cotonou, Dakar, or Lomé, collecting payments from American or European customers poses obstacles that their counterparts in Berlin or Toronto couldn’t even imagine. This situation presents a structural bottleneck , preventing significant access to the global market. In response to this exclusion, alternatives have emerged, including Selar , M-Pesa , and Chipper Cash . A blog post by software company Nestuge explains their real-world advantages and limitations. These tools have become the everyday infrastructure of an economy that official systems have refused to serve. Douglas Kendyson , the founder of Selar, explains that it aims to offer creators a direct and credible way to monetize their skills worldwide. According to a study published in the International Journal of Advanced Scientific Research , African creators who use these platforms have significantly higher levels of entrepreneurial autonomy than those who depend exclusively on Western platforms.


Ultimately, this informal economy operates outside any institutional framework, compensating for the lack of a structured and viable ecosystem. Much like the informal trade networks that serve the continent across national borders, it is blazing its own trail where the state and global market have failed to build connecting infrastructure. It’s a necessary infrastructure that’s as resilient as it is spontaneous. Cultural data, profits elsewhere A study on mapping the data labor supply chain in Africa found that thousands of workers, mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa, work as moderators, filtering traumatic content while annotating datasets to train artificial intelligence (AI) for major technology platforms, and that they contribute to systems that deny them any rights. The authors use the term “digital apartheid” to describe infrastructure in which access to tools, markets, and remuneration remains structurally unequal based on location. Generative AI has added a layer of irony to the equation. Initiatives like Waxal , launched by Google to document some African languages , rely on thousands of African contributors. However, there is a structural problem.


Once fed this open-source data, the machine generates content that circulates and is monetized, with the original language keepers receiving no revenue, shifting from digital inclusion to a new form of cultural extractivism. A study, titled “Data Flows and Colonial Regimes in Africa: A Critical Analysis of the Colonial Futurities Embedded in AI Recommendation Algorithms in Africa,” shows that these same models are subsequently used to generate cultural African content, such as avatars, music, and visuals, which compete directly with the human creators whose work provided the source material. The system is restricted since value flows in only one direction. The case of Shudu Gram is a prime example. This entirely digital supermodel, whose appearance mirrors that of a black South African woman, was created and marketed by a white British photographer, Cameron-James Wilson. She received substantial advertising budgets, imitating a culture with which she shares no origin. Building alongside the system Sedo Tossou , a Beninese creator, founded Sedo+ , an African streaming platform, without raising external investor funding. In a sector obsessed with growth metrics, this decision was, indeed, a political statement.


In an interview with Hors Script and a round-table in Lomé, he explained his reasoning with clarity that challenges the mainstream narratives of African tech: Si tu n'as pas le pouvoir de l'argent, il faut que tu développes le pouvoir de la communauté. Le capital étranger cherche rarement à financer les récits africains et cherche à en contrôler le cadre. Cette distinction est fondamentale. If you don’t have the power of money, you must develop the power of community. Foreign investment rarely seeks to finance African narratives, but rather to control their framework. That is a fundamental difference. His assessment of the ecosystem focuses on its structure, especially the contractual stringency, rights management, and institutional capacity to protect what is created. This structure is often built in opposition to a framework that discourages informality but fails to provide an effective gateway into the formal sector. Specialists in edutainment — education through entertainment — now play a strategic role at the center of this transfer. Their success ultimately depends on their ability to merge knowledge and narrative to protect their value, making it incomprehensible to a market that seeks to quantify it at any cost. Who will receive the USD 17 billion in 2030?


In 2020, a study by the German development agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit ( GIZ ) titled “ Governance of the platform economy in developing countries and emerging economies ” had already underscored the absence of a robust regulatory framework in Africa. Without regulation on data, digital labor law, and taxation, there is a structural risk that income generated on the continent will flow outward to external actors. Three years on, in 2023, a study by Professors Tom Kwanya and Kutoma J. Wakunuma on platform regulation in Kenya showed that even in the most advanced countries in this area, the legal framework for click-worker (graphics labeler) protection remains underdeveloped. Actors in this sector regularly identify three key matters as non-negotiable. Firstly, cultural data sovereignty. When African content is used to train AI models, the original creators must be identified, tracked, and paid. Secondly, click-worker protection . Moderation is work that deserves a decent salary, social security coverage, and legal recognition, not a subcontracting agreement hidden behind three layers of service providers. Lastly, international pay equity concerning geographical pay differentials is a structural choice. Without these three fundamental changes, African creators will continue to see other non-African actors reap the benefits of their hard work instead.


AI warfare triggers Putin, as Kremlin moves to dismantle the last pieces of Russian internet

At the beginning of April 2026, the Russian government’s attempts to limit access to anything out of its control on the internet kicked into high gear. Apart from ongoing mobile internet shutdowns — including an unprecedented one in the capital that lasted for three weeks — there is now a war on VPNs , attempts to try out “white lists” on both mobile and home internet connections, and blockage of the last “Western” messenger, Telegram . It might be a strange coincidence, but the Israeli–US war on Iran , “Operation Epic Fury,” which has employed a lot of AI warfare, started on February 28 — a week before the full mobile internet shutdown in Moscow. During the first few days of the war up to March 3, as many as 17 high-ranking Iranian government and military officials were killed in strategic targeted strikes involving AI warfare strategies. According to the BBC , since February 28, the United States has launched more than 11,000 strikes against Iran , many reportedly identified by project Marvin AI.


Maven Smart Systems is a project by the Palantir company , which has been developing AI-enabled solutions for the Pentagon since 2017. Maven uses machine learning algorithms to analyze and fuse vast amounts of surveillance data from multiple sources, made possible through data integration. Since 2025, it also integrates large language models (LLMs), such as Anthropic’s Claude, to enhance intelligence fusion, targeting, and accelerated decision-making. The data that the project uses to analyse and identify potential targets include photographs, satellite imagery, geolocation data (IP address, geotag, metadata, etc.) from communications intercepts, infrared sensors, synthetic-aperture radar, and more. The use of AI warfare in Iran has been criticised by experts. In an interview with France 24, political theory professor Elke Schwarz described the radical acceleration of both the process of identifying military targets using artificial intelligence and the speed of decision-making regarding strikes, noting that in the first 24 hours of this war alone, the US launched a thousand missiles per day — about 41 missiles per hour — against specific targets.


To Schwarz, this implies a virtual absence of human oversight over such decisions, as it is physically impossible to ensure such a level of control. The professor believes this is extremely dangerous, especially considering that AI models have a reliability of only 25–50 percent , meaning they are very often wrong. She added that legislators and international organizations need to intervene, to determine the permissibility and impermissibility of using such AI models in military operations. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to describe the technical specifications of how AI warfare initiatives like Project Maven specifically identify human targets, it is possible that shutting down most of the mobile internet in Moscow from March 6–24 — as well as other measures to control the remaining pieces of the Russian internet — was triggered by its use , according to some Ukrainian sources. TV Rain and other independent media claimed that Putin was very concerned about his safety after the US kidnapped Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Various media sources also claimed that Putin’s paranoia might have grown since the “cynical murder” — as Putin himself called it — of Khamenei and other high-ranking Iranian officials.


The only comment that journalists received about this unprecedented mobile internet shutdown in Moscow was from Putin’s press secretary Peskov, who kept saying that it was done in the name of “security.” Although mobile internet shutdowns have been going on in Russia for months now, they have never before been implemented at such a scale. It collapsed not only a large part of the digitally-based service sector in Moscow, but also the metro, grocery stores, and even public toilets. Independent Russian media outlet The Bell wrote that, according to their sources, the requirement to restrict internet access in certain districts of Moscow was given to operators by the Scientific and Technical Service (STS) of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia’s main security agency. The shutdowns were “handed down from above,” a government official confirmed. According to the source, the government did not know the reasons, but the justification was countering threats , though the specific types of threats remain unknown. “A certain map was received from the STS of the FSB, marking where the internet needed to be switched off.


At the same time, law enforcement officials strongly hinted that this was not their decision; it had also been passed down to them,” one of The Bell’s sources said . Later on, the popular and the last remaining “Western” messenger, Telegram, was blocked, in spite of the fact that even those from the military fighting in Ukraine were actively against it. However, Telegram’s owner Pavel Durov said that, even after the block, nearly 65 million people from Russia still use Telegram every day. After that, Roskomnadzor , the federal executive agency responsible for mass media, attempted to block VPN traffic , and half of Russia’s internet services stopped working, including banking apps and state services. Some IT specialists and media — even those loyal to the state, like Nataliya Kasperskaya — said that Roskomnadzor, “in the frenzy of fighting methods to bypass blocks, has taken down half of the Runet’s services.” She later had to delete her post and apologize . Roskomnadzor and the Ministry of Digital Development then moved to make the remaining Russia-based platforms such as the search engine Yandex, social media VK, and online market Ozon block users who use their internet services while employing VPNs.


According to some media sources , having been threatened with measures such as eliminating them from white lists and depriving them of licences to work; they were forced to sign an agreement to comply with those instructions. Despite the possibility that the blockage might damage their businesses and destroy any international strategies they might have, there is evidence that the companies have already started doing just that, despite the fact that most of them have owners and CEOs who are closely connected to the Kremlin. Some investigative journalists have even suggested that some of the remaining platforms bring income to Putin and his friends the Kovalchuk brothers . The companies are now also obliged to spy on their users and pass on the data to the authorities. VPN detection is proposed in three stages : first, companies must determine a user’s IP address; next, they must search for signs of circumvention tools on the device through their own applications; and finally, they are required to check devices running operating systems beyond Android and iOS. It is important to understand, writes The Bell , that this marks a shift from passive internet censorship to active enforcement.


“In essence, every such application will become spyware,” explains one VPN developer. In other words, any app from a Russian online platform risks becoming similar to Max . Most likely, in the near future, applications linked to Russia will track VPN usage and forward their findings for blocking. This measure is highly effective and difficult to circumvent.” Investigative journalist Andrei Zakharov explains in the Meduza podcast that Alexandra Prokopenko , author of a book about the Russian elites of Putin’s regime, recently wrote that Putin and other old people from the siloviki , are now the ones in control in the Kremlin. Zakharov emphasises that if this group decides there is a threat — imagined or not — they simply shut everything down, as they want to know exactly what Russians think, say, watch and do on the internet. Additional proof that Putin and the siloviki are impressed by AI warfare, is that the Russian leader began to actively speak about AI . Putin spoke at a meeting about the importance of developing Russia’s own LLMs and introducing them in every institution, including the military.


This sits in stark contrast with the fact that there are constant internet shutdowns, and all access to foreign technological services is blocked. Moreover, because there is such a war on international traffic and VPNs, even access to open source tech innovations like GitHub or Hugging Face would be severely restricted. It's worth noting that Russia has also been using AI technologies in its war on Ukraine, albeit via narrow, niche models with specific objectives. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes , Russian developers are using open language models, such as Mistral, Qwen, LLaMA, and YOLO, to create programs for autonomous military platforms with AI elements. These include drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as guidance and interception systems. Thus, Russia is less dependent on sanctions — the models are openly available — and Russian developers don’t have to create them from scratch; instead, they can build military AI solutions using existing foreign open source development tools. Before the Ukraine war, Russia had an AI development program through 2030 , held hackathons, and created startups.


Some experts even predicted that Russia, with its powerful mathematical training system and funding for AI development, could become a serious niche player in AI. Now, Putin is speaking of AI again, but with an emphasis on defence, warfare, and sovereignty. There is also the possibility that foreign AI solutions could be blocked in 2027 as part of this new strategy. However, even pre-war AI developments in Russia had mixed consequences. This was highlighted by a recent scandal in which it was discovered — according to an investigation by Le Monde and Forbidden Stories — that Iran acquired Russian company NtechLab’s FindFace facial recognition system to combat protests. The same facial recognition systems had already been in use in Russia before the war with Ukraine. In Moscow, they helped identify protesters , and during the war, they identified conscripts attempting to avoid being sent to the front. Although there is currently no full internet shutdown in Russia in contrast with Iran, and no domestic internet like in North Korea, the Russian version gets closer daily.


Hungary just held its most consequential election since 1989

On April 12, 2026, Hungary held one of its most important elections in nearly four decades, widely broadcast for its relevance not just on a domestic scale, but globally. Prior to the polls, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had enjoyed the endorsement of U.S. President Donald Trump ; he was also on friendly terms with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and both countries were a topic of conversation in Hungary during the campaign. US Vice President J.D. Vance visited Budapest a few days before the elections, and rumours were circulating about the alleged involvement of Russian counterintelligence in the elections. The choice Hungarians needed to make was between the incumbent FIDESZ party, which had led the country for the past 16 years, and the TISZA party, which emerged two years ago. In the eyes of voters, though, that choice boiled down to either Russia or the European Union (EU).


Orbán had criticised the EU for years and formed a close relationship with Moscow, as per the voice recording that emerged of Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó. TISZA leader Péter Magyar, on the other hand, painted a pro-EU picture to citizens, promising to chage back all the autocratic changes to institutions in Hungary which were done by Orban and his party previously, including the judiciary and media's dependence on the ruling party. Election turnout, meanwhile, was at an all-time high of 79.5 percent . The polls closed at 7 p.m. local time; by around 9 p.m., Magyar posted that Orbán had called him and congratulated him on his win. From that moment, the only question was by what margin of victory. It soon became evident that the voter turnout would not be the only historic thing about this election; TISZA ended up collecting a two-thirds majority — a strong sign that Hungarians want to belong in Europe and work with the EU. The result has left Russia without a strong foothold in Europe.


At about 11 p.m. on election night, Péter Magyar delivered a lengthy speech in which promised to end the divide he says FIDESZ installed in Hungary. He also asked longstanding political players dependent on or closely connected to Orbán to step down so that a new era could begin. Among these, he identified the President of the Curia, President of the Constitutional Court, Prosecutor General, President of the State Audit Office, President of the Hungarian Competition Authority, President of the Media Authority, President of the National Office for the Judiciary, and the President of Hungary Tamás Sulyok, whom he encouraged to convene the inaugural session of the new National Assembly as soon as possible. Magyar also promised to establish a National Asset Recovery Office to investigate the status of lost EU funds as well as overall corruption in the country. The path the country seems to be charting for itself may come with its challenges, but the strengthening of the Hungarian Forint once the election results were confirmed offers hope.


Magyar was very explicit about this in his speech, in which he highlighted that his government will not be perfect, but will give Hungary its best shot. In terms of public sentiment, approximately 30 percent of voters appear to be disappointed — and in disbelief — at the convincing TISZA win. The majority of the population, however, couldn’t be happier with the result: after Magyar’s speech, the capital, Budapest, turned into a massive party . Strangers were hugging and dancing with one another, and many cried as the news broke: the change they had been hoping to come to fruition finally manifested.


AI-ready data centers are booming in Indonesia but water woes loom

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) led to a surge in the establishment of data centers across Indonesia, but several stakeholders have raised concerns about its impact on the local water supply. The rapid growth of generative AI is expected to generate USD 243.5 billion in economic production capacity, which is equivalent to around 18 percent of Indonesia’s 2022 gross domestic product. To unlock this potential, it requires resources to build AI-ready data centers. “Data centers are not just technological infrastructure; they are the key to creating a new AI-driven economy and enabling inclusive digital transformation,” said Dharma Simorangkir, president director of Microsoft Indonesia. As of April 2026, there are 170 data centers in the country. This number is bound to increase after Singapore, a major digital hub in Southeast Asia, imposes stricter requirements on data center investments. Cities near Singapore, like Johor in Malaysia and Batam in Indonesia, have attracted data center investments to cater to the high demand for AI-related infrastructure in the region.


But accompanying this positive economic prospect is the concern that it could also cause some harm in communities because data centers require massive amounts of water. Data centers need large air-conditioning units and advanced liquid-cooling systems to operate. DataCenterBoom!, which monitors the social impact of data centers, noted in a report that a medium-sized data center consumes approximately 300,000 gallons of water per day (110 million gallons per year), equivalent to the annual water consumption of approximately 1,000 households. In Indonesia, nearly half of the 170 data centers are located in hot places. This means their excessive consumption of water could undermine public access to this essential resource. In 2025, the Media Monitoring Repository on AI Incidents in Indonesia recorded six cases involving data centers linked to database leaks, performance failures, and excessive energy consumption. The situation in Batam could illustrate how the rise of data centers has exacerbated the city’s water problems.


There are 18 data centers at the Batam Industrial Complex, and similar facilities have been approved to turn the shipbuilding and manufacturing hub into a regional digital powerhouse. Researcher Rezza Aji Pratama has written about the resource requirements for data center investments in Batam. At the Kabil Industrial Park, new data centers will need 56 megawatts and up to 3 million liters of water per day for cooling, which is enough to meet the daily needs of around 30,000 people. The proposed nine data centers in Nongsa Digital Park will need a load capacity of 285 megawatts and around 29 million liters of water per day. The existing and the planned data centers would consume around eight percent of Batam’s water supply. A tech company has this message on its website promoting data centers in Batam. “With access to renewable energy sources, abundant water supply, and strict environmental regulations, Batam is embracing sustainable development.” But Batam has consistently faced water woes.


In September 2024, a local protest demanded that authorities address how the data centers are reducing the water supply in their communities. Uba Ingan Sigalingging of the Gerakan Bersama Rakyat summed up the water problem in Batam in a media interview. The situation of water congestion in Batam is currently like a lottery, it’s just a matter of waiting for which housing won’t receive water today. I think the people of Batam have been too patient in facing this problem, the demonstration earlier was the peak and the condition will only get hotter in the future. In December 2024, dozens of residents from the Teluk Mata Ikan fishing village gathered in front of data center facilities at the Nongsa Digital Park and protested the uninterrupted flow of water in the tech complex while their communities suffer from constant water shortages. Authorities immediately resolved the issue and attributed the problem to a “technical glitch” that disrupted the water distribution.


The water situation is a reminder to balance Batam’s aggressive push to become a digital center by addressing the basic needs of the local population. “We are not opposed to development, but the local government must carefully balance industrial expansion with environmental sustainability,” environmentalist Gari Dafit Semet said in an interview with Channel News Asia. In an interview with Jakarta Post, Hotmauli Sidabalok, researcher at Yayasan Amerta Air Indonesia, warned that failure to address the concern on water scarcity could lead to environmental injustice. The situation may lead to environmental injustice. Human needs, with water being a basic necessity, compete with the demands of data centers. Not to mention the broader implications for ecosystem inequality. This becomes even more concerning in the context of climate change, which is already contributing to increasing water scarcity. As AI becomes more widespread, Indonesia can benefit from tech investments, but the concern about the excessive resource use of data centers is a reminder that the principles of sustainability and justice should guide the policies and practices of authorities and all stakeholders.


For AI to work for us, it will have to stop pretending to be us

My work constantly pushes me to interrogate new technologies, to ask how they are designed, who they are built for, how they are governed, who benefits from them, and who is left to deal with the consequences on their own. That scepticism has made me a late adopter of new technology more times than I can count. Last year, I seriously started questioning whether an ethical and feminist AI is even possible. Could there be a version of this technology that allows us, as feminists and human rights advocates, to engage with it without compromising our politics or our commitment to defending intersectional human rights? That hesitation and that lack of urgency to jump onto every new tech trend come from years of watching how tech companies operate. Again and again, they have established that their primary commitment is to their business models, not to the people using their platforms. “Senator, we run ads,” as Mark Zuckerberg once said. But beyond the statements that go viral, there are also those said in closed meetings.


For example, I recently asked a tech company representative at a rights conference how their social media platform differentiates between harmful and harmless engagement when serving ads. They told me, “I encourage people to read our terms of service.” The assumption that people have not read these documents, especially in a room where everyone has spent years interrogating the business models of tech companies, told me how little appetite there is for meaningful engagement and transparency, let alone accountability. So when I question whether AI can ever be ethical or feminist, even in some alternate timeline, it doesn’t come from cynicism for the sake of it, but from years of watching patterns repeat. The promises to do better, the carefully crafted language of responsibility, the performance of listening, none of it has meaningfully shifted how these systems are built or who they serve. If anything, it has made clearer that when it comes to protecting our rights, we are largely on our own. No government or tech company is coming to defend them for us or with us.


So when we talk about a human rights approach to AI, it means confronting and dismantling the systems that are intentionally built to serve power, not people, and refusing to accept that this is the only way these technologies can exist. Challenging the tech status quo This proposal starts from a place we must not ignore: tech is not neutral. It actively reinforces the same patriarchal and colonial power structures that many of us have been living under for generations — a powerful entity (in this case, a tech corporation) will dictate what people’s social interactions will look like, and the public will comply without question. These systems are designed by specific actors, in specific locations, with very particular worldviews. So it matters who is building them, who is controlling them, where they are being built, who gets to define what counts as a “gold standard,” and who is expected to fall in line for these systems to continue to work uninterrupted. All of this shapes how power is exercised over both narratives and lives. One of the first things we need to be honest about is that tech has never been neutral.


That idea has always been more of a marketing strategy that many of us have fallen for, because every system carries the values, priorities and biases of the people and institutions that build it. And AI is no different, as it is built on infrastructure and trained on data that reflects the world as it is, i.e. unequal, biased and often violent, and then it reproduces those patterns at a larger scale, with a layer of authority that makes them harder to question. Take training data, for instance. These systems are fed enormous amounts of information scraped from the internet, from public records to everyday interactions we don’t even realise we’re part of. And that data is shaped by histories of exclusion, racism, sexism and economic inequality. When AI learns from that, it encodes them, sometimes amplifies them, and then presents them back to us as if they are neutral outputs. Content that is labelled as “intelligent” is often just a more efficient way of repeating what already exists. Then there are corporate biases, which are far less subtle. The companies building these systems are not public institutions with their own biases; rather, they are profit-driven entities with shareholders and growth targets.


That shapes everything, from what problems are worth solving to how quickly systems are deployed, often without fully understanding their consequences. Whose lands are going to be acquired for vast data centres that leave lasting ecological impact but increase shareholder value, whose knowledge is going to be stolen and appropriated for the corporate race to develop the most advanced AI model, whose life will have to be labelled “collateral damage” in the war to be precise, who will be pushed into silence and invisibility by being loud about the innovation that these systems promise? All of this leads to inequality becoming harder to trace because it is hidden behind layers of algorithms, code, automation, complexity and carefully crafted marketing strategy. The digital world extends the problems of the physical one, often in ways that are more difficult to see and challenge. And perhaps most troubling is the way AI contributes to the growing sense of dehumanisation. In militarised contexts, especially, people are reduced to data points, targets to be identified, tracked and eliminated within seconds. Decisions that carry life-and-death consequences are increasingly mediated through systems that do not understand context, history or humanity.


The reduction of humans to inputs and outputs, signals to be processed, targets to be achieved, makes the harms easier to justify in reports and briefings. The deaths and destruction become a success rate, and people are reduced to just numbers on file, which is a deliberate political choice about how we value human life. It can’t be us All of this also feeds into a growing narrative that AI will eventually replace humans. But if we take a step back and look at the reality, this idea starts to fall apart. What AI can do is recognise patterns, process large amounts of data, generate responses that feel convincing, and replicate a tone that feels human. What AI cannot do is be human. It cannot understand context in the way we live it, feel care, hold relationships, or carry the weight of lived experience. The replication of patterns to depict human-like connection is not the same as human connection. It doesn’t come from understanding or empathy; instead, it comes from predictions that are just statistical guesses based on what data has been fed into the system.


And when we start treating that as equivalent to human interaction, we end up devaluing what it actually means to relate to one another. Care work, community building, resistance, empathy, joy, showing up for each other — these are not functions you can automate. Even the idea of “conscious” AI, which keeps resurfacing in tech conversations, is often just a rebranding of more complex prediction systems. At the end of the day, these models are still generating outputs based on probabilities shaped by the data. They don’t know what they’re saying, nor do they understand the consequences, because they don’t carry responsibility towards another being. That distinction matters, especially when these systems are being positioned as decision-makers in areas that significantly affect people’s lives. And perhaps that’s where this connects back to the bigger issue. When we start to believe that humans can be replaced, it becomes easier to accept systems that already treat people as data points, whether it’s in research, hiring, policing, health care, welfare or warfare. The same logic that reduces people to inputs also makes them disposable.


So pushing back against this narrative is about holding on to the idea that human lives, empathy, experiences, realities and relationships cannot be reduced to something a machine can simulate and optimise. If we are serious about even imagining a human rights approach to AI, we first have to let go of this idea that technology can replace us, or can be prioritised over us, or can define what it means to be human. It can’t, and it shouldn’t. Because everything this technology draws from — land, environment, resources, time, energy, entire ecosystems — comes from a world that exists for the living beings — humans, flora, fauna — that have inhabited it since long before any of these systems were even conceptualised. Reframing that relationship means recognising that AI should never come at the cost of life or dignity, or the conditions that make life possible in the first place. Need for accountability However, the responsibility of protecting the world we live in cannot be pushed onto the very people who have the least power to shape these technologies.