Recorded November 7 2025 | 39 min 00 sec | Guest: Rebecca Mbaya

Highlights

• Agency, ownership, and belonging in African AI futures

• Why representation and authority matter in data work

• The hidden costs of AI: Congo, cobalt, and systemic inequality

• Rebalancing the WEIRD default (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic)

Summary

In this powerful conversation, Rebecca Mbaya — social innovator, researcher, and creator of The African Innovators Series — joins Jax and Erik to explore AI through an African lens.

Rebecca works in data and evaluation to bridge historical context, lived experience, and systemic analysis. From the DRC’s role in powering global technology to the erasure of African realities in AI systems, she brings clarity to issues too often hidden behind the curtain.

Together, we unpack agency, language, representation, and responsibility — and what it means to shape AI futures for the next generations. The conversation ranges from colonial legacies to data annotation, mothering to mentorship, and colonial memory to collective action.

As Rebecca closes with a simple, powerful invitation to always ask who is left out of this conversation, she offers that we have a choice to be on the right side of history.

Takeaways

• Agency is foundational: African communities must not wait for permission to shape AI futures.
• Language shapes reality: AI is built on WEIRD assumptions — and that must shift.
• Representation is not enough: Data workers need authority, voice, and fair conditions.
• AI reveals structural cracks: Technology pulls back the curtain on systems we can no longer ignore, but the onus still falls on us.




🔗 Links & ResourcesFeatured

• Rebecca’s Substack

• The African Innovators Series (TAIS)

• LinkedIn — Rebecca Mbaya

  
  

  Referenced

• WEIRD framework (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic)

• “54 Shades of Africa” Substack series (link)

• Work on data annotation and global south labor

• PLANET Framework (People, Language, Agency, Need, Environment, Technique)




Sound Bites / Quotes

• On Agency: “Agency is really about a sense of ownership, understanding that. So a sense of ownership and a sense of belonging, right? Understanding that I belong to this conversation. I have a part to play. I also own a part of this space, right?”

• On AI colonialism: “It was gunpowder against arrows. Now it’s infrastructures, data infrastructures against us.

• “In the Western side of the world is more about efficiency and optimizing and speed and scale. That’s not really what we focus on here. We have systemic issues that we’re trying to deal with. We have wars that we’re trying to stop. So we’re not trying to scale anything here. We’re trying to fix a broken system. So how would AI be applied in our context?”

• “The DRC is the producer of over 70 % of global reserves when it comes to Colton and Cobalt. But yet I couldn’t get why would the people on the ground not even understand what is AI and how it affects us?”

• “WEIRD, which is Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. That’s how the language of AI is built, right? In other words, it does not see anything else that’s not Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. …

  You know, so for me is the language that built AI, the language on which AI is built, the language logic of AI just doesn’t see any other reality than the weird one. So how do I, how do we as people understand that we have agency to shift the language of AI, right? So we can address our needs.”

• “I hope that they open their minds to other realities that are not always reflected in their own context, that they always ask the question: who is left out of this conversation?”

• “I really wanted to be able to tell my kids, because I have children, one day if they do ask me, instead of complaining about this issue, what did you actually do about it? So that’s how I had to really first of all understand that I have a voice that can be heard, I have a part to play.”

  Full transcript and show notes