Compensation in HCI research is often the primary ethical interface between HCI researchers and low-income communities. Yet, prevailing models of compensation can perpetuate neocolonial extraction and frame participation as transactional labor. This practice risks creating dependency and obscuring power imbalances, ultimately compromising both research integrity and participant dignity. Drawing on the experiences of researchers working in Africa and the southern African philosophy of Ubuntu, this paper employs a decolonial lens to critique the research economy of participation and compensation. We propose a framework for relational compensation, which re-imagines compensation not as payment for data but as a form of restorative justice and relational accountability. Through analytic vignettes, we examine tensions around community-researcher interdependency, gendered care burdens, and community solidarity. We conclude with principles for relational research economies that prioritize communal benefit, long-term data sovereignty, and co-designed terms of engagement, offering HCI a path toward reciprocal praxis.

As artificial intelligence continues to advance, marginalized communities, particularly in Africa, remain limited in their ability to shape what AI should do, how it should be built, and how it might benefit them. This study adopted a speculative co-design approach with participants from Ocean View, a low-income community in South Africa. The aim was to elicit and facilitate collective visions to reimagine the future of AI and explore ways to make AI technologies more culturally relevant. Our findings reveal participants’ perceptions about AI, which informed a collective vision of AI designs that embed the community’s local language and culture as well as services aimed at improving the community’s economic opportunities. Based on these insights, we identified directions for ethical AI design for marginalized communities that recognise and preserve cultural identity, needs for affordable AI designs, and the potential of AI for their socio-economic advancement as trajectories within AI research.