Thought Leadership in AI Winner
About Maha
Maha Jouini is an AI ethics and policy advocate working to embed Arab, Muslim and African women's narratives into global AI governance. A UNESCO MENA Top 20 AI Changemaker and Women in AI Ethics honouree, she is also a breast cancer survivor whose experience as 'outlier data' — a patient whose cultural realities and rights were not reflected in the systems meant to support her — has shaped her advocacy into one of the most distinctive voices in the global AI governance conversation.
Her work
Through multilingual writing, public speaking, radio and community engagement, Maha makes AI governance accessible to communities historically excluded from it, bringing complex policy concepts into local languages and cultural contexts. MahaBot, her decolonial chatbot hosted on her website, explains AI policy through Arab-Islamic ethical frameworks, including Hikma, the philosophy of holistic wisdom. As part of the Women in Focus Initiative at the Global Center on AI Governance, she spotlights women in AI from North Africa and francophone Africa, broadening representation beyond Anglo-Saxon narratives. She is also building Shifa, meaning healing in Arabic, an AI companion for women with breast and cervical cancer in North Africa, designed around the cultural and legal realities women in the region actually face.
Reach and recognition
31,000+ followers on Facebook; thousands of monthly readers on her website
Ubuntu Radio conversation on reclaiming Africa's digital future reached 10,000+ listeners
20+ articles published on AI ethics, digital sovereignty, gender and governance, highlighted by Stanford and UNESCO networks
40+ women in AI from North Africa and francophone Africa spotlighted through the Women in Focus Initiative
15+ artistic and literary workshops participated in, reaching 500+ artists and writers
Featured by the Asfari Institute for her role in reshaping AI discourse from an Arab feminist and decolonial perspective
Responsible AI in practice
For Maha, responsible AI begins with who is in the room when the systems are built. Her advocacy pushes back against fragmented, siloed approaches to AI governance in which technologists, ethicists, policymakers and legal experts work in isolation. She argues that AI built without culturally sovereign, multilingual, community-grounded input will reproduce the inequalities it was meant to address. MahaBot and Shifa are practical demonstrations of this: AI built not just for underrepresented communities but in conversation with them.
Vision for the future
An AI future where forgotten narratives are restored, dignity is non-negotiable, and communities co-author the technologies that shape their lives. Civilisational dialogue: the idea that the era of agentic AI must be shaped not only by those who build the machines, but by all of humanity.
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