Designing Informed Consent for AI Tools: Supporting Real Choice for Global Majority Users
The Equity & AI Learning Series is a six-session collaborative learning initiative led by Cooperation Canada, in partnership with Salanga, created in response to the rapid adoption of AI across the non-profit and international cooperation sector.
How can we design AI tools that genuinely support understanding, agency and informed decision-making?
As AI powered tools rapidly become part of development and humanitarian programming, one important question remains often overlooked: do users actually understand what they are agreeing to when they share their data?
The sixth and final session of the Equity & AI Learning Series explored this question through the lens of informed consent. Led by digital development consultant Isabelle Amazon-Brown, the session used practical examples, prototype testing, and discussion to examine why existing consent approaches often fall short, particularly in Global Majority contexts, highlighting how language, literacy, disability, age, culture, connectivity, digital experience, legal protections and power could affect if people genuinely understood what they were agreeing to.
Examining why informed consent should not be reduced to a privacy policy, legal statement or one-time request for users to click “Accept”, the session covered in-depth, four foundations of meaningful consent:
- Freely given
- Specific
- Informed
- Unambiguous
While exploring what each of these principles mean in practice, when people interact with AI systems.
Participants explored how consent also becomes more difficult as data moves across multiple systems, unkown future use of information when consent is first collected, the risks of poorly designed consent for both users and organizations and some of the difficult tensions organizations must navigate. Discussions also surfaced around if consent can truly be freely given when declining may limit access to essential services, how to protect children without creating additional privacy risks, respecting cultural differences while protecting individual rights, how to keep consent practices relevant as AI technologies evolve faster than laws or organizational systems and so much more.
Overall, the session covered how informed consent can be treated as an ongoing design and learning process that supports trust and protects rights, while giving people a genuine ability to understand and shape how their information is used. For teams and proffessionals exploring what it takes to design informed consent processes that build trust, protect people’s rights and support real choice, we’ve captured the key learnings and reflections from this session in the free learning material below:
