Profile photo Kauna

Kauna Ibrahim Malgwi

AI Accountability & Digital Rights

Kauna Ibrahim Malgwi is a clinical psychologist, digital rights advocate, and founder of the Digital Rights and Mental Health Initiative (DRMHI). She serves as Chairperson of the Steering Committee of the African Content Moderators Union in Nigeria, a role she built from the inside, as a former Meta content moderator working in Hausa language, where developed PTSD after years of exposure to graphic violence. She did not study this problem from a distance. She lived it, and then built the infrastructure to respond to it.

Her advocacy focuses on algorithmic trauma, exploitative digital labor conditions, and the psychological burden carried by millions of data workers whose labor sustains AI systems but remains unseen. In collaboration with the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) through the Data Workers’ inquiry, she developed trauma-informed clinical interventions tailored specifically for data workers (Content moderators, Data Laballers, AI trainers, etc.), establishing new frameworks for worker support. In 2024, her achievements were recognized with her inclusion on the TIME100 list of the most influential people in AI and her selection as one of the BBC’s 100 Women, underscoring her impact in both tech and social advocacy.

Kauna holds an MSc in Clinical Psychology from USIU-Africa and is pursuing a PhD in Marriage and Family Therapy at Pan Africa Christian University. Her research covers vicarious trauma, family-based treatment models, and systemic interventions for digital well-being.
For Shrine, Kauna carries a dual lens no one else on the advisory board holds: clinical expertise in AI-caused psychological harm, and lived experience of exactly that harm. Her scrutiny directly shapes shrine’s trauma-informed interaction design, its consent and data donation architecture, and the safety of its AI interaction model at the level where principles meet real human cost. She is also part of shrine’s core community — navigating identity, displacement, and belonging between cultures — which means her perspective as an advisor is inseparable from her experience as someone shrine is built for.
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