AFDS: From Clicks to Progress – Youth Digital Pathways for Sustainable Development
By Duncan Koome
Monday the 12th of August 2024 marked the International Youth Day. This was the 24th edition of the day since its inception by the United Nations through Resolution 54/120 of December 1999. For this reason, the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners (NGFP) Network in Africa met to recollect and revisit the work done by the 22 members of the NGFP Africa Sensing Network, on the Future for Data Governance in Africa.
The dialogue was in line with the theme of Youth Day. Bringing to the fore a perfect opportunity to back cast from the futures visioned 3 years ago during the pandemic, the current situation evolving around sustainable development and the prospects for including digital pathways to help attain these goals.
The Africa Digital Futures Project brought together 22 next-generation changemakers paired with senior African futurists and thought leaders in early 2021 to launch provocative conversations on data governance & data-driven technology as ideated, developed, and for potential use by countries across Africa.
During the process, NGFP Africa members worked in teams centred in Kenyan, Nigerian, and pan-African communities. The teams utilised a couple of foresight tools to identify emerging signals, insights, explore alternative future scenarios, and generate visions for the world we want to create through stories, new media and artefacts from the future.
The Future of Data Governance in Africa project featured local narratives and outlooks from the cohort that dissected issues such as privacy, data protection and overall utilisation and governance of data-oriented systems. It is these visions that were in review for the day, as the network of African youth converged in discussing developments since the project completion in 2021.
Stories & Visions Reviewed
Our Future World
This story was curated by Brian Wamukota and Roselyn Wanjiru from the NGFP Kenyan cohort. Their story looked at the present-day reality of what data can be compared to. In the same way parents take their children to school because children with an education fair in terms of literacy and livelihoods, data access was viewed in the same light.
The curators viewed data as a tool that could assist in decision-making on matters of wealth, health and agriculture. Conversely, the risk of data misuse and a misguided approach to decision-making was also cited and expected – which is the situation most African states find themselves in today. Very little progress can be attributed to data besides the fact that data is used to present more disparities and call for aid and financing support from the global North. In Africa, most of the data collected and published is done by foreign aid agencies operating in the continent rather than national, regional or continental government agencies.
The vision calls for effective governance of data to avoid misuse and to ensure the data is trustworthy and consistent. With support from the World Bank, the African Union aimed to increase connectivity from 22% in 2020 to all individuals, businesses and governments by 2030. This became an infrastructure question that has seen the World Bank and African Development Bank lend at least $300m to last-mile electrification projects in Kenya alone. One can see the monumental task in ensuring the underlying infrastructure necessary to increase the level of connectivity on the continent. This story ended with a desired vision of oneness and inclusivity that can help foster a connected and enlightened empowerment of the future where data will not be misused or weaponised against present and future generations.
Roselyne Wanjiru was on the call to review the input she gave for the above story. She noted the need for data literacy to help most of the non-tech savvy population understand the importance of privacy on the digital platforms due to the increasing risks of violation of privacy and misuse of data to track down and even adversely affect individuals as witnessed during the protests in Kenya.
The reflections from this story ended up raising concern on the weaponisation of data and technology. Data security and the privacy of individual data and how censorship has been growing for use to control populations politically and socially. The most notable of such instances happened in Canada when truckers protesting the lockdown mandates during Covid had their bank accounts frozen so that they were unable to procure necessities including the fuel that allowed them to drive around in protest convoys. Another instance was witnessed with some countries in Africa utilising electronic voter systems, it was clear that the digitisation of the process did very little to improve the exercise of voting as witnessed in Kenya and Nigeria.
Journey to 2050
‘Where systems are people-centric, everyone’s voice will matter in governance and policy implementation.’ The story envisioned Africa in the year 2050 from a Nigerian perspective that looked to creating a harmonious future using data-driven technologies even down to the socioeconomics of day-to-day life.
The vision captured in the story narrated of self-driven taxis, cryptocurrency mobile wallets for e-payments and the solar powered lighting of the streets and cityscape which has made the cost of power/electricity cheaper. In retrospect, the cost of power since the story was published has increased by 42% and by 168% over 8 years from 2015 – 2023.
The vision captured public participation through SMS on budgetary proposals on allocations where the locals were mobilising to have their requests heard by their senator to reverse those allocations. It is this segment of the vision that I’m very much interested in as an African. We often speak of anticipatory governance that has the representative political class overarching their ideas of what the people want against the actual needs of the locals. It is the lack of tangible citizen participation in governance that has seen Nigerian youth go to the streets over poor governance and corruption – a similar situation to what was witnessed in Kenya in June 2024.
In reviewing his work, Chiagozie Udeh, from the NGFP Nigeria cohort, mentioned electronic voting which unfortunately, failed to deliver transparent results in the process as witnessed in 2022. Like Kenya, there were a lot of discrepancies and legal appeals against results issued even after the voter results portal deeming themselves as open and transparent. Nigeria’s Bimodal Voting Accreditation System had an election in Osun state reversed after a reversal by an election tribunal found instances of over-voting. This raised a lot of questions on the digitalization of such use cases and the necessary work required to improve and adapt the technology to policy safeguards that will allow the wishes of the electorate to be realised.
Tribes of Future Past
This story by Mutsa Samuel, from the NGFP pan-Africa cohort, takes the audience to the future of African innovations and discoveries. The story projects the mindset and self-consciousness to build the Africa we envision and ideate. From the onset, the vision of smart home systems becomes apparent. A system that monitors your sleep, daily nutrition and caloric intake while suggesting self-improvement exercises in audiobooks and meditation classes.
The vision included Tree-Tech, a pioneering genetic weaving between man and tree that would allow a healthy co-existence between the two and a perilous one should humanity fail to protect and conserve their environment. With interests and funding from billionaire philanthro-capitalists, this genetic weaving with trees will transfer the existential threat facing trees to humans – and maybe this is the action that needs to be taken to ensure preservation, with certainty, of the future of our forests and health.
Experiential-sensing was another interesting aspect of Mutsa’s vision in the story. I happened to share the same sentiments in a separate vision for Virtual Museums that allow Africans to relive experiences of their past and how that can be used to inform their future. The curator focused on Apartheid for an experience, but one would generally think of slavery as an African. From the Arab to the Trans-Atlantic slave trades that lasted for hundreds of years and preceded the resource exploitation in Africa that persists to this day during colonialism and currently as neocolonialism. Maybe experiencing the loss and pain through experiential-sensing can permit to memory the lessons learnt from futures passed (past) that are necessary to ideate and realise ideal futures for Africa.
The network members reacted to this story in the affirmative. The continent is currently losing its culture and traditions – its indigenous foods and resources under exploitation, not forgetting the forests and fresh waters from rivers and rivulets that are now disappearing.
Parting Thoughts
In expectation of the Summit of the Future this September, the outputs of which feature the Global Digital Compact, it is expected that the Youth, herein the digital natives will be most prepared to utilise technology to produce and develop the goods and services of the future. The governments of the day must look at the demographic and make necessary steps to ensure their participation and action towards establishing alternative and innovative futures.
Connectivity in general has increased on the continent as efforts to extend broadband connectivity successfully have borne fruit.
Such aspects of data governance have come to pass. Africa is now looking at growing its infrastructural capacity to leverage on emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence to aid in its development agenda. With the AI market expected to be worth $407 bn by 2027, Africa should have a say in the development of ethical AI systems away from the prejudiced bias used in training AI models.
Data protection and privacy concerns remain a challenging area for African nations as most are just now familiarising with policies and laws to regulate the sector. These regulatory rail guards are necessary to ensure minimal risk to exposure and allow healthy adaptation for data sharing for re-use. OpenAI’s WorldCoin tokenistic intrusion/debacle in some African countries should be curtailed examples to learn from.
Digital literacy is also an important enabler to understanding the digital age. The transition from legacy systems might not be smooth, but teaching the local population on the benefits and convenience of digital technology can help extend opt-in and active usage of technology. The visions captured in the Future of Data Governance in Africa looked at data and data sharing as a public good and having the citizenry aware of the same can help raise the collective awareness (interaction with datasets) to duty and service from private and public sectors.
We invite those interested in perusing through the visions of healthy data governance in Africa to interact with the stories here.
In hindsight, the African Union has since developed a Digital Transformation Strategy 2020-2030 from which all nation states under the AU adopted the Continental AI Strategy and the African Digital Compact in July 2024. These policies set the stage for regulation in the digital ecosystem and participation of African youth in the digital economy of the future.
From simple clicks and scrolls in consumption of data to meaningful progressive utilisation in analysis and development of local contextualised digital tools, applications & systems, Africa can already attest to the impact in opening avenues for innovation, creating citizen-centric service delivery and employment opportunities through digital technologies.
Duncan Koome is Program Officer & Co-Africa Network Weaver supporting the Fairer Futures for Africa Programme with Society of International Development’s Regional Office for Africa.