Chadian environmental activist Hindou Oumarou: ‘AI governance must respect Indigenous peoples’

Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, president of the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad and a former UN Permanent Forum chair, spoke to Dialogue Earth about gaps in African AI governance following the UN's first Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva this July. She argues that national AI strategies focus heavily on safety, economic competition, and jobs while largely ignoring the energy, water, and mineral demands of data centers and their effects on Indigenous territories.

Ibrahim calls for environmental and social impact assessments on AI infrastructure, formal Indigenous participation in AI governance, and protections for collectively held cultural and environmental data, which she says conventional individual-focused privacy frameworks fail to cover. She points to a Chadian example where participatory mapping, satellite data, and predictive AI tools helped anticipate drought and protect herders' migration routes.

She warns that without ecological guardrails, AI expansion could accelerate extraction on lands that are disproportionately Indigenous-held and biodiversity-rich.

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