What does meaningful AI governance look like when it's designed by the people most affected by the technology? Two recent workshops in Malawi offer a powerful answer—and a model that challenges how we think about participatory technology development.

When disasters strike multilingual communities or conflicts emerge in remote regions, the inability to communicate across language barriers can cost lives. This challenge sits at the heart of a broader problem: while artificial intelligence could revolutionize humanitarian response and conflict prevention, it requires vast amounts of contextual, representative data that simply doesn't exist for most crisis-affected populations.