Ethiopian-born artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru and the Rural Women’s Assembly, a movement representing more than 178,000 small-scale farmers across Southern Africa, have been named among the four recipients of the 2026 Right Livelihood Award.
The Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Foundation announced the winners on Wednesday, 30 September, placing African leadership in technology accountability, land rights and food sovereignty at the centre of this year’s honours.
Pakistan’s Jalila Haider, a human rights lawyer from the Hazara community, and the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association complete the group of laureates. The foundation said the four were selected from 200 nominations spanning 72 countries.
A challenge to concentrated power in AI
Gebru was recognised for challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and advancing technology grounded in justice, lived experience and human agency.
Born in Ethiopia to a family of Eritrean origin, she left the country at 15 during the Ethiopian-Eritrean war and later sought asylum in the United States. She earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University, co-founded Black in AI and established the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, known as DAIR.
Her work has helped move debate about AI beyond performance and commercial opportunity towards questions of who designs the systems, whose interests they serve and which communities bear the risks when technology reproduces discrimination.
Gebru said the award’s recognition of the human rights dimension of her research was particularly meaningful. She said science could be infused with human rights without sacrificing rigour, and that doing so could make the work better.
That argument has become increasingly urgent as governments and companies race to deploy generative AI, facial recognition and automated decision systems. For African countries, the issue is not simply whether to adopt new tools. It is also whether local languages, social conditions and communities are represented in the data, research teams and policy choices that shape those tools.
Rural women recognised for land and seed rights
The Rural Women’s Assembly was honoured for organising women across Southern Africa to defend land, seed and bodily autonomy against corporate and patriarchal dispossession.
Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Cape Town, the volunteer-led movement operates across 11 countries. It has established 24 seed multiplication sites and documented hundreds of Indigenous seed varieties, strengthening farmers’ ability to save, exchange and replant seeds while building resilience to climate shocks.
The movement also links food sovereignty with women’s political and bodily rights. Its cross-border organising, healing circles and leadership programmes have sought to give women who are frequently excluded from formal land ownership a stronger voice in decisions about agriculture, natural resources and community life.
Right Livelihood said the network’s advocacy contributed to a 2016 Zambian measure mandating equal land allocation to women and Eswatini’s 2018 Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence law.
Mercia Andrews, the assembly’s regional coordinator, described change as the result of the patient, collective force of thousands of rural women organising together. She said the recognition could help their struggles be seen as a practical model for justice for land and the people who care for it.
One award, connected questions
Although Gebru’s field is digital technology and the assembly’s work is rooted in farms and rural communities, their campaigns confront a shared question: who controls systems that increasingly determine people’s opportunities, safety and livelihoods?
For Gebru, that means scrutinising powerful technology companies and broadening the group of people who decide how AI is built. For the Rural Women’s Assembly, it means resisting the concentration of control over land, seeds and food systems while defending women’s freedom to make decisions about their lives.
Ole von Uexkull, executive director of Right Livelihood, said this year’s laureates had refused to wait for permission and were challenging rules long set by political, patriarchal and corporate power.
The award, founded in 1980 and often described as the Alternative Nobel Prize, supports people and organisations working for justice, peace and sustainability. The 2026 laureates are due to be honoured at a televised presentation in Stockholm on 1 December.
Why it matters
The recognition gives global visibility to two forms of African leadership that can be overlooked in conventional accounts of innovation. One is represented by a researcher insisting that technology must answer to human rights. The other comes from rural women treating traditional knowledge, seed diversity and collective organising as essential infrastructure for food security.
Their inclusion also challenges the idea that solutions must flow from powerful institutions to communities. DAIR’s distributed research model and the Rural Women’s Assembly’s volunteer-led network both place people affected by policy and technology closer to the centre of decision-making.
As AI regulation, climate resilience and food security move higher on national agendas, governments, universities and businesses across Africa should follow how these laureates turn critique into practical alternatives. Readers can learn more about the winners and their work through the Right Livelihood Foundation’s 2026 laureate programme.
