Critical approaches to AI from African and Indigenous perspectives

The Made in Africa AI for MERL blueprint offers a practitioner-led, decolonial framework for how African MERL practitioners adopt, integrate, or resist AI, on their own terms. This panel discussion will draw from MERL Tech's Made in Africa AI for MERL landscape study to expand that conversation to include Indigenous perspectives, interrogating shared questions about whose knowledge counts and how it is preserved in an era of rapid technological change. Through dialogue, panelists and participants will explore what critical and responsible AI approaches mean for African and Indigenous evaluation practice, grounded in lived experience, community accountability, and localization as key guiding evaluation principles.