Nambi The image library by and for Black women
Preview · Founding circle forming

AI still can't picture us. So we'll show it.

Nambi is a nonprofit, community-owned, consent-first image library of Black women, described in our own words and licensed on our terms. When AI companies license it, the women in it get paid. In Our Image.

—days
—hours
—minutes
until launch on International Women's Day, March 8, 2027
Try the contributor flow
0 Black women in the collection
0 Images contributed

The 10-point Monk Skin Tone scale. Every image in the library is labeled by the woman in it, never guessed.

The problem

The data AI learns from barely includes us.

Black women
2.55%
White women
28.8%

Share of faces in a 4,000-image sample of the dataset behind NVIDIA's StyleGAN. Source: Cybernetic Forests.

Why Nambi

She chose to stay.

In the Buganda origin story of Kintu and Nambi, Nambi is the daughter of Ggulu, the sky. When her brothers went home, she chose to stay on earth and decide her own path, and she won her father's consent to marry Kintu. Together they became the mother and father of a people.

Some tellings blame her for letting death follow them to earth when she went back for millet. We tell it differently: she went back to feed her household, and her children outlived death.

Nambi stands for a woman who chooses, whose consent matters, and whose line endures. That is what this movement is built on.

How it works

Architects of our own stories.

Share yourself

Upload photos of you, with clear consent for exactly how they may be used. Adults only, always.

Describe yourself

Label your hair, skin tone, setting and story from a vocabulary our community governs. AI may suggest; you decide.

Get paid

A fixed share of every license goes to the women whose images are in it, with a dashboard showing what you earned.

Contributor preview

Try it with your own photo.

Preview mode: your photo stays on this device. Nothing is uploaded or saved, and it disappears when you close the page.

Consent

Never allowed, in any license: deepfakes or impersonation, sexualized content, surveillance or facial recognition.

Skin tone

Monk scale, 1–10

Hair texture
Hair style
Age range
Setting
Expression
Cultural dress

The story you want this image to tell. Try typing "ethnic hair" or "urban".

Preview gallery

Every image, described by the woman in it.

Our promises

Consent is the product.