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Insights from the Global Convening on the Political Economy of AI and Digital Technologies 

Unpublished

From 10 to 12 September, the Global Fund for a New Economy invited our Associate Programme Officer- Africa, Roselyne Onyango, to their Global Convening on the Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Technologies. This second in-person meeting was held in Nairobi, Kenya. 

The convening brought together civil society, labour movements, and advocacy groups to discuss how AI and digital technologies reshape economies and societies globally and within the participants' focus areas. 

The sessions highlighted how much of today's technological infrastructure is driven by a highly concentrated Global North-based tech sector, whose pursuit of profit and dominance is fuelling challenges such as worker precarity, privatisation of public infrastructure, authoritarian surveillance, and environmental degradation. The sessions also explored critical issues for the Global South, including the challenges of equal digital infrastructure, data ownership, the role of the state in the emerging digital world, and the gendered impacts of AI on women's lives and livelihoods. 

The convening underscored the urgent need to build collective strategies that resist corporate and authoritarian control over the digital and AI stack, while advancing equitable, democratic, and sustainable alternatives. Discussions focused on three key tracks: 

  • Public services and infrastructure, examining the political economy of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and AI value chains, with a view to shaping genuinely public-interest models and resisting captured approaches. 
  • Work and labour, exploring the impacts of AI on different sectors of work and opportunities for cross-sector organising and collective action. 
  • Climate and natural resources, bringing environmental justice to the center by unpacking AI's demands on energy, water, and ecological systems. 

These discussions resonate strongly with our work on challenging corporate capture, defending public services, and advancing human rights frameworks. The political economy lens applied to AI and digital technologies highlights how concentrated corporate power and weak accountability mirror patterns in global financial and economic architecture. It also opens opportunities for us and our allies to link technology governance to broader struggles for social justice, whether on equitable financing of public services, resisting privatisation, or demanding accountability for environmental harms. 

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