Lanfrica was honored to participate in a high-level panel at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) during the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, in a side event titled “Promoting AI for Good in the Global South” which took place April 7 to April 11, 2025, in Geneva, Switzerland.
The event, which was jointly organized by Recreate, Access to Knowledge (A2K), and Fundacion Via Libre, brought together experts from Latin America and Africa to discuss the cultural, legal, and copyright challenges of building responsible AI from the Global South.
Lanfrica joined an inspiring, all-women panel composed of leading voices from across the Global South, contributing African perspectives to the conversation. The discussions revolved around how we can collaboratively build AI systems that are open, ethical, and rooted in local contexts.
Key themes that emerged:
- Strategic Partnerships: Emphasizing the value of collaborations with public institutions, universities, and community stakeholders to ensure trust and legitimacy throughout AI development.
- Cultural Representation: Highlighting the urgency of building language models that reflect our own cultures, languages, and lived realities.
- Legal Barriers: Addressing the legal gaps many countries still face, especially around data access for training AI—such as the lack of clear exceptions for text and data mining (TDM).
- Community-Led Development: Advocating for open, community-led AI development as a path toward true technological sovereignty.
Lanfrica shared insights from its work linking African language datasets and resources, and highlighted the NaijaVoices initiative as an example of community-driven, ethically-minded language data farming.
As projects like LatamGPT in Latin America and initiatives like NaijaVoices in Africa gain momentum, a global movement is forming—one that centers equity, transparency, and inclusion in the future of AI.
