TLDR: The University of Cape Town (UCT) is hosting a webinar featuring Dr. Samwel Moses Ntapanta, who will delve into how traditional African practices of repair, reuse, and salvage can offer new perspectives and contribute to the global discourse on AI ethics. The initiative aims to broaden AI ethical frameworks beyond conventional concerns like bias and privacy, to include material and ecological afterlives of AI technologies.
The University of Cape Town (UCT) is spearheading a critical re-evaluation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics by bringing African practices of repair, reuse, and salvage into dialogue with global AI discussions. This initiative, highlighted in an upcoming webinar featuring Dr. Samwel Moses Ntapanta, seeks to enrich the understanding of ethical and sustainable digital futures through grounded, relational, and improvisational approaches prevalent in many African cities.
Dr. Ntapanta, an ethnographer specializing in contemporary urbanism in East Africa, will argue that the everyday work of technicians, recyclers, and community innovators in sustaining technological life amidst scarcity and infrastructural neglect embodies a unique ethical reasoning. This reasoning, rooted in care and resilience, emerges from the material demands of keeping technology operational under precarious conditions, rather than abstract principles.
The webinar will explore how these ‘repair ecologies’ can inform the entire AI lifecycle, from end-user devices and sensor assemblages to data-center hardware and their waste streams. By examining how discarded electronics and digital tools are repurposed in countries like Tanzania and Kenya, Dr. Ntapanta aims to clarify AI’s dependence on ongoing maintenance labor and its often-toxic afterlives.
This perspective challenges dominant AI-ethics frameworks that typically focus narrowly on issues such as bias, transparency, or privacy. Instead, it proposes a broader moral horizon that accounts for the material and ecological consequences of AI, its extractive infrastructures, and the uneven geographies of its waste. The talk will advocate for an ethics rooted in endurance, interdependence, and accountability to the planetary impact of digital progress, positioning repair ecologies as central to reimagining an ethical and sustainable AI future.
UCT’s commitment to this expanded view of AI ethics is part of its broader AI Initiative, which aims to develop AI for a ‘Just World’ by accelerating research in areas like Health and Wellbeing, Climate and the Environment, Poverty, Inequality, and AI Safety. The university recently launched the African Hub on AI Safety, Peace, and Security, a platform designed to ensure African perspectives are central to global AI safety debates.
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While the initial news summary indicated a publication date of November 9, 2025, UCT’s event listings show the ‘Repair, Reuse, Salvage’ webinar is scheduled for November 26, 2025. This highlights UCT’s ongoing efforts to foster dialogue and research that addresses the unique dimensions of AI governance, infrastructure, and social impact within the African context.
