Akina Mama wa Afrika, in collaboration with The Bretton Woods Project (BWP), MENA Fem (Movement For Economic, Development, and Ecological Justice) and Christian Aid held a side session at the Civil Society Policy Forum, titled Financing caring economies beyond extraction: Feminist perspectives on tax justice, AI and development.

As the IMF and World Bank deepen their engagement with artificial intelligence and digitisation as drivers of development, this session asked harder questions: whose labour powers these systems, who pays for them, and who is left out?
Drawing on feminist political economy, Dr Lyla Latif, one of our panellists, examined the global financial architecture and how AI and platform capitalism are reproducing colonial patterns of extraction, deepening inequalities, and further shifting unpaid care burdens onto women.

Watch the full session here:

Dr Lyla Latif’s recent article titled She Cleans Your House, the Tax System Cannot See Her, highlights the plight of African women working through domestic service platforms across Africa and how tax systems systematically undervalue care work and reproduce hierarchies through apparently neutral rules.
She argues that domestic service platforms across Africa interact with national fiscal systems that were not designed to recognise informal work, thus excluding domestic and care workers from formal fiscal recognition.

Read her full article here: