From praxis to practice
Ideas only matter when they ship.
Our three programs are where the framework becomes real work — training, hackathons, wellness and advisory that put women in the room and keep them there.
See the programs →Innofeminism is not a statement of values — it is a method. A way of building technology and innovation that starts from the people it was never designed for, and refuses to launch until they are in the room.
Innofeminism is a praxis that empowers African women to harness their afrofeminist innovative capacity — pairing hard technical skill with an ethical framework for building justly.
It begins from a simple refusal: that the tools shaping our lives were built without the people they most affect. And it ends in the work of putting those people back in the room — not as subjects, but as builders.
Before we say what we build, look at what today's technology does to the people it was never designed for.
Commercial gender-classification systems misread darker-skinned women up to 35% of the time — against 0.8% for lighter-skinned men. When a system can't see you, you're invisible to everything built on it.
Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018
An AI trained on a decade of résumés taught itself that male = qualified — and downgraded any application that included the word “women's.”
Reuters, 2018
Even with equal income and stronger credit, women are approved for less and charged more. The unmet financing gap facing women-owned businesses worldwide is real, and vast.
World Economic Forum / IFC, 2022–2023
None of this was inevitable. Each of these systems was built by people who never had to live with the result. When the people a technology affects help build it, different questions get asked, different faces get tested, and the gaps start closing before launch instead of after.
Three moves turn the praxis into practice.
We build alternatives to existing systems — without the biases, exclusions and oppressions baked into today's platforms.
In practice: rebuilding a tool from the dataset up, so the defaults serve the people who were previously edge cases.
We equip women across technology and innovation with the tools, networks and confidence to demand equity from the inside out.
In practice: the fellow who stays, rises, and changes what her team ships from a seat at the table.
We create innovations for neglected social issues — the problems others overlook because they aren't “marketable.”
In practice: starting from a need no market has priced, and building anyway because it matters.
Our three programs are where the framework becomes real work — training, hackathons, wellness and advisory that put women in the room and keep them there.
See the programs →Become a fellow, partner with us, or donate today.