Barbara Ntambirweki is an External PhD Candidate at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society, affiliated with the Digifood Project. She holds a Master of Laws (LLM) in International Law from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. In 2023, she was selected as a Digital Practitioner Fellow at Stanford University.

Barbara is a lawyer, advocate, academic specializing in technology justice and food system governance in Africa. Her extensive research and policy analysis focus on the governance of emerging technologies, synthetic biology, and the digitalization of food and agricultural systems, with a particular emphasis on the African context. Most recently, she has worked with communities and local governments in Kenya and Zambia to advance the importance of participatory technology assessments in the governance of emerging technologies.

Currently her research addresses the underexplored application of Participatory Technology Assessment in African contexts, examining how such frameworks can be adapted, localized, and scaled to support more equitable governance of digital agriculture, Artificial Intelligence systems, and data sovereignty. It specifically investigates the marginalization of smallholder farmers and local communities in technology decision-making, alongside the weak protections for data sovereignty that allow external actors to extract value from local agricultural data without transparent governance.