Wakanyi Macharia-Hoffman

The Ubuntu scholar who says Western AI is reinventing something her tradition has held for centuries.

Philosophical, warm, a tradition-bearer. Brings a mature epistemology to the AI discourse.

Wakanyi Hoffman was born and raised in Kenya, has lived in eight countries across four continents, and is now based in Europe, where she leads research on sustainable African AI at Utrecht University's Inclusive AI Lab. She is a global voice for Ubuntu philosophy — the African relational account of personhood summarized as "I am because we are" — and founded the African Folktales Project, a growing open resource of African stories for schoolchildren. She has been a fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg.

She prefers the word "habitat" to "community": an inhabitant is shaped by where they are and what they do there.

Her presence at the summit is a direct challenge to a habit of Western thought — the assumption that a knower can stand outside the thing being known, observing it cleanly. Ubuntu never accepted that premise. The knower is always inside, always in relation. That is not a soft or decorative idea; it is a different starting point, and it produces different questions about what we are building.

You'll take away: a reframe you can use, practically. Instead of asking how to align a system to a list of values, ask what relationships it creates and what kind of people it produces. That question works on a product, a classroom or a team, and it tends to surface things the values conversation misses.

ONE LISTEN — "Building inclusive AI: indigenous knowledge frameworks from Kenya and beyond," Humanitarian Leadership Academy podcast. She lays out the Ubuntu "right to relate" framework in plain terms.