In this week’s post, Etoe Ruddy Carine Tchuekam argues that AI-driven inequality in Africa goes beyond the digital divide. When bias is embedded in data and algorithms, existing inequalities can be reproduced in ways that are difficult to see or challenge. She calls for a new approach to equality—one that is preventive, accountable, participatory, and equitable, ensuring that African women and marginalised communities help shape, and benefit from, Africa’s AI future.

This week, Dr. Meghan Finn notes that South Africa’s equality legislation was drafted, deliberately and against sustained resistance, to reach discrimination in the private sphere as well as by the state. She further notes that twenty-six years on, some of its most important provisions for targeting privatised inequality remain dormant. The result is a striking gap between an ambitious statutory scheme as the drafting archive reveals, and its operation.