Whose Evidence Counts? AI, Trust, and Equitable Evaluation in the Global South

As artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes monitoring and evaluation systems, it is transforming how evidence is generated, interpreted, and used. While AI offers opportunities for efficiency and real-time insights, it also raises critical concerns around bias, exclusion, and trust, particularly in Global South contexts where data systems remain uneven and historically shaped by external paradigms.
This session brings together contributors to the books ‘Equitable Evaluation: Voices from the Global South; and ‘Evaluation as a Mechanism to Foster an Equitable Society in the Global South’, alongside practitioners and emerging evaluators, to examine how evaluation can remain equitable and trustworthy in the age of AI. Drawing on practical experiences from South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda, the discussion will explore how potential misalignments between policy, data systems, and lived realities can undermine trust in evidence, and how these risks may be further amplified by AI-enabled approaches.
Grounded in Made in Africa Evaluation (MAE), the session will interrogate whose knowledge is prioritised in AI-driven evaluation systems and advance practical recommendations for integrating AI in ways that are ethical, inclusive, and context-responsive.
By bridging Global South scholarship with practitioner experience and emerging evaluator perspectives, the session contributes to global dialogue on building evaluation systems that are both technologically robust and socially just.
Objectives:
-Examine and discuss how AI is reshaping evidence generation and use in evaluation
-Interrogate risks of bias, exclusion, and trust deficits in AI-driven systems
-Explore Made in Africa Evaluation as a framework for ethical and context-responsive AI integration
-Identify practical strategies for building trustworthy and equitable evaluation systems