Speaking back to the divide: Reassembling gender, mobile communication, and AI through feminist data justice in Zambia

Drawing on the Ask Viamo Anything (AVA) Pilot in Zambia, a voice-first generative AI integrated into mobile phones, this article examines how mobile AI platforms reassemble the gendered digital divide. Through a feminist technology studies and feminist data justice lens, it argues that systems like AVA embody both empowerment and constraint: they enable women and youth to engage in private, trusted, voice-based communication while simultaneously reproducing structural exclusions through language, moderation, and infrastructural dependency. This commentary situates mobile AI within mobile communication scholarship, extending its concern with everyday mediation, intimacy, and mobility into the algorithmic age. In doing so, the article illustrates mobile AI as a new communicative form that redistributes agency, visibility, and voice along gendered lines.