Over the course of the last year, the Responsible AI (RAI) Fellows have engaged in a series of sessions investigating six key themes that will be relevant for the future of AI in the Global South: the environment, labor, education & epistemology, data collection and accessibility, AI as a governance tool, and human interaction with AI models.

Following these sessions, the Fellows met in-person for the first time at a two-day scenario-building workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, where they split into four groups that each built out a scenario answering the following question in different ways:

In 2031, five years from now, how will AI have positively impacted life in the Global South?

Each scenario development group tackled this question differently, incorporating the six key themes as they saw fit. At the end of the workshop, the Fellows had created four scenarios exploring technological sovereignty, government accountability, lifelong learning, and rural development in AI, respectively. To bring the scenarios to life, each group also created 2-3 ‘personas,’ or imaginary characters designed to represent how real people in the Global South might experience each outcome.

On this page, you can access each of the four scenarios. As you read, we ask that you evaluate them critically – does this scenario sound feasible? Does it describe a meaningful benefit for lived realities in the Global South? And what policy steps –whether locally or internationally – can we take to make our ideal futures come true?