Kristophina Shilongo

Kristophina is a researcher contributing to the sustainable adoption of data-driven technologies in Africa. She is curious about drawing lessons from collective/participatory governance frameworks in various sectors to apply to the development and deployment of AI technologies. Kristophina recently joined Mozilla as a Senior Tech Policy Fellow, after working as a Research Associate at Research ICT Africa, where she worked on various AI Projects particularly focusing on incorporating data and climate justice lenses into the development of AI policies on the African continent.

She holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences focusing on Data and Society as well as a bachelor’s degree in Communications from the Namibia University of Science and Technology.

Kristophina’s project at Mozilla will focus on supporting or finding alternative data governance frameworks which center African community or collective needs and safeguard their rights. Premised in the understanding that poor populations and communities that have faced historical exclusion are disproportionately affected by the failures of data ecosystems (or AI systems), her project will draw policy lessons from how other industries and sectors have successfully or otherwise unsuccessfully developed or implemented participatory or collective governance frameworks which do not cause further harm to these vulnerable communities. She also wants to promote this method of enterprise comparison as a policymaking approach with a high probability for trust as it demonstrates that policymakers care about the implications of their policies and are not merely responding to demands to make rules about a phenomena.