Rural Journalists as Co-Designers: A Case Study of the AI Journalism Fellowship

AI development largely excludes marginalized communities lacking English fluency and digital access. The AI Journalism Fellowship (AIJF) addressed this gap through a three-month participatory program with ten rural women journalists in India, combining AI literacy, storytelling, and co-design. Working within smartphone-only constraints, the team built four Hindi-first, voice-enabled WhatsApp bots, refined through an iterative learn-create-reflect-redesign cycle. Drawing on artefacts, voice-note reflections, and feedback data, this case study finds that participatory design surfaces needs that conventional research would miss, fosters reciprocal knowledge production, and offers lessons for building more inclusive AI in the Global South.