MTI’s Core Collaborator Varaidzo Matimba will be at FIFAFRICA!

The Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa, hosted by Collaboration on International ICT Policy For East And Southern Africa (CIPESA), is taking place in Mauritius from September 28 to October 1st.

Vari is hosting a workshop entitled “Beyond Accuracy, Beyond Borrowed: AI Evaluation Metrics That Count What Actually Matters in Africa”.

Emerging tools for evaluating AI-enabled programming remain uncalibrated for Africa, even as consequential decisions about pricing models, vendor lock-in and local language training data are being made right now, with long-term implications for who benefits and who bears the risk. They tend to prioritise accuracy benchmarks, retention curves and RCT-driven impact studies over equity, distributional effects and community-centred outcomes.

This session explores the vital importance of formative research and participatory design principles that apply an intersectional and vulnerabilities lens to questions of autonomy, agency, and inclusion when it comes to evaluation of AI programming.The M4D and ICT4D fields have already learned hard lessons about vanity metrics, the denominator problem, what “reach” actually means, and why frequency and quality of engagement matter more than headline numbers. This session insists we stop repeating those mistakes at AI speed and AI scale, taking seriously the work that happens before deployment angled in formative research.

This workshop will surface three things:

1. How evaluation frameworks and responsible digital design guidance in Africa can center community needs and user expertise from the outset
2. Why metric design must be a live, adaptive process  not a compliance exercise performed at project close
3. How formative research into user context, switching costs, and competing tools should precede both product design and its evaluation framework