Category: Africa

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Hafte Gebreselassie Gebrihet, Research fellow, University of Oslo; University of Cape Town

All United Nations member states adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. They cover poverty, health, education, inequality, climate change, peace and other global issues. The goals are now approaching their 2030 deadline.

The goals matter because they shape national plans, international cooperation and decisions about development funding. The question of what should follow them can no longer be postponed.

The UN has already begun preparing for that discussion. The Pact for the Future invites the High-level Political Forum, under the auspices of the General Assembly, to consider in September 2027 how sustainable development should be advanced by 2030 and beyond.

This gives the African Union and its member states about a year to agree on their priorities and influence the debate before its main ideas are settled.

Will Africa help write it, or simply respond to it?

We study Africa’s leadership in global development debates. A recent study led by Hafte Gebreselassie Gebrihet examines how the Common African Position, a shared set of African priorities for the negotiations that produced the SDGs, influenced the post-2015 development agenda. It shows that Africa has helped shape a global development framework before. In 2014, African governments adopted the common position while negotiations on the goals were still under way. It gave African negotiators a shared set of priorities before the final agreement was reached.

Entering the process with an agreed position gave them more influence. It identified structural transformation, decent work, science and technology, peace and security, environmental sustainability, development finance and more equitable global partnerships as priorities for the continent. Several of these ideas were later reflected in the SDGs.

This mattered because African governments had long been treated more as implementers of global development agendas than as agenda setters. Structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 1990s introduced major economic reforms across the continent with limited regard for African priorities. The Millennium Development Goals later focused global attention on poverty, health and education, but offered little space for a coordinated African role in defining the agenda itself.

The Common African Position changed that pattern. It showed that influence begins before leaders arrive at a summit, when priorities are defined, coalitions are built and negotiating language is drafted.

That lesson matters again.

Can the African Union do it again?

The Common African Position was not the product of easy agreement among African governments. It followed two years of political organisation and consultation.

The AU Assembly gave the African Union Commission responsibility for identifying continental priorities with member states and regional economic communities. The assembly also created a committee of ten heads of state and government. Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf led it. The committee coordinated African leaders and built support beyond the continent.

Parliamentarians, regional organisations, civil society groups, women and young people, trade unions, academics and businesses contributed to consultations at national, regional and continental levels.

African and UN institutions provided technical support. After the common position was adopted, the AU Assembly told member states to speak with one voice. It also asked the committee to develop a plan for advocacy, negotiation and alliance building.

A similar effort is possible today. Africa still has time to shape the process.

The Addis Ababa Declaration, adopted in April 2026 at the Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development, calls for active and collective African engagement in shaping the post-2030 framework.

The declaration links the process to African priorities and the AU’s Agenda 2063. It sets out initial ideas for the next framework. It also asks Mauritius to present the declaration and its main messages at the 2027 summit and other international meetings.

But the declaration is a starting point, not a new common position.

Turning it into a formal continental negotiating position will require leadership from heads of state. The African Union Commission must coordinate the process. Governments must also consult widely and agree on priorities.

The next framework will be negotiated under very different conditions. Climate change has intensified. Debt has increased. Aid budgets are shrinking. Competition among global powers is changing international cooperation. New technologies are also creating opportunities and widening inequalities.

Africa’s experience with the Common African Position points to five ways the continent can strengthen its influence when negotiations begin.

Five crucial steps

1. Agree on priorities early

African leaders adopted the common position before the global goals were finalised. They entered the process with a common understanding of their priorities and interests.

The post-2030 framework may sound distant. But the ideas that will shape it are already being discussed. By the time governments enter formal negotiations, many of the main proposals will have been developed, debated and revised.

African governments should begin that work now, before the main choices are made.

2. Speak with one voice

The African Union has 55 member states. They have different political systems, economies and development priorities. Complete agreement is neither realistic nor necessary. But the 2014 experience showed that African countries can gain influence by agreeing on their main priorities.

A coordinated position gives negotiators greater leverage than dozens of separate national interventions. It also shows that certain concerns are continental rather than national.

This will matter in debates over climate finance, debt restructuring, access to technology and reform of international institutions.

3. Align the post-2030 agenda with Agenda 2063

Africa does not need to invent a new vision for itself every time the international community develops a new framework. It already has one.

Agenda 2063 sets out the African Union’s long-term aspirations for an integrated, prosperous and peaceful continent driven by its own citizens.

Building on Agenda 2063 would give the African position both continuity and political credibility.

The task is to ensure that the next global framework reflects priorities Africa has already chosen.

4. Focus on a limited number of strategic priorities

A long list of demands would weaken Africa’s negotiating position. A future common position should not include every challenge facing the continent. It should focus on issues where African countries have urgent needs and shared interests.

The priorities should include development finance, climate adaptation, debt sustainability, technological capacity and reform of global institutions.

A shorter list would help African negotiators defend each priority more consistently. It would also make it easier to build alliances and keep attention on the issues that matter most.

5. Move from reacting to agenda-setting

Africa’s influence increased when it helped define the debate rather than reacting to proposals developed elsewhere.

For decades, African countries have often been portrayed as recipients of development agendas designed by others. The Common African Position challenged that assumption. It showed that African governments can shape international priorities when they enter the process early, coordinate their positions and connect their concerns to wider global debates.

Before the 2027 SDG Summit, the African Union and its member states should agree on a concise post-2030 position rooted in Agenda 2063. Otherwise, Africa risks returning to a familiar role: accepting choices that were made elsewhere.

– Africa shaped the global 2030 development agenda. How it can influence what comes next
– https://theconversation.com/africa-shaped-the-global-2030-development-agenda-how-it-can-influence-what-comes-next-287922

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Michael Asiedu, Researcher, University of St.Gallen

Kenya went into its general election in August 2022 with one of the continent’s most developed networks for countering false information.

After the disputed 2007 vote – when rumours helped drive violence in which more than 1,200 people were killed – a dense network of fact-checkers emerged in the country. This includes organisations such as Africa Check and PesaCheck, backed by newsrooms, civil society groups and big tech platforms.

Fact-checking is the careful work of verifying a claim and publishing a correction if the claim is false. Fact-checkers set as their core mission identifying misinformation (false information shared by people who do not mean to deceive) and disinformation (false information spread on purpose, usually to gain an advantage).

Yet, false claims still saturated the information environment around the vote in 2022. In a survey taken shortly before polling day, 60% of Kenyans said they had come across election information they suspected was deliberately false or inaccurate. Separately, Reuters Institute data found that at least 75% of Kenyan news consumers struggle to tell real from fake news online.

I am a comparative politics scholar who studies how African governments seek to control the flow of information – and how courts, journalists and civil society respond. In a recent paper, I examined the limits of fact-checking during Kenya’s 2022 elections, drawing on practitioner interviews and an analysis of 150 fact-checks.

I argue that fact-checkers were caught in what I call a “timing trap”: even in a well-resourced verification environment, they struggled to disrupt the spread of mis/disinformation during elections.

Three forces create this trap:

• false claims travel faster than anyone can check them

• careful verification is necessarily slow

• in a polarised race, people judge a correction by whose side it appears to help rather than by whether it is true.

The obstacles

A fact-check only helps if it reaches people before they have made up their minds. During an election, that rarely happens.

My study identified three reasons for this.

1. Speed: false claims travel faster than corrections. A 2018 study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tracked millions of social media posts. It found that false stories spread further and faster than true ones, with the gap being widest for political news. A rumour can reach millions of phones before anyone has finished checking it. Kenya’s information environment makes that speed particularly hard to outrun. By 2022 the country had 11.75 million active social media users. False claims typically surfaced first in closed WhatsApp and Telegram groups before moving to Twitter, Facebook and vernacular radio, circulating through private networks that formal verification organisations cannot monitor.

2. The nature of good fact-checking: done properly, it is slow. It means pinning down the exact claim, gathering evidence, contacting the institutions involved and passing the result through editorial review. This makes a correction trustworthy, but it costs time an election doesn’t give. One case from my Kenya study shows this clearly. A forged notice, dressed up with the electoral commission’s letterhead, claimed that 6,000 new polling stations would open in areas that favoured one candidate. It began spreading on WhatsApp and Twitter on 14 July 2022. Africa Check confirmed it was fake on 18 July and published the correction, by which time it had already been shared thousands of times.

3. It’s political: whether people accept a correction depends on the mood around them. Kenya’s 2022 race was tight and tense, and was settled only when the supreme court confirmed William Ruto’s narrow win over Raila Odinga. In that atmosphere, information becomes a matter of loyalty. A correction that seems to help one side over another feels like an attack, so people reject it. Fact-checkers told me they were accused of bias for whichever claim they checked. Confusion even came from official quarters. Four election commissioners publicly disowned the presidential results moments before they were declared, leaving fact-checkers to untangle a dispute that had begun inside the very body meant to safeguard the vote.

Put together, these three forces spring the timing trap. False claims peak at the exact moment when checking is slowest and minds are most closed.

Why this matters

Governments, donors and platforms increasingly treat fact-checking as the frontline against election lies and fund it as if it can hold that line on its own.

My findings suggest we are asking one tool to do a job it cannot do alone. When it is overwhelmed, the cost is not just a few false stories. It is eroded trust in results and, as Kenya’s own history shows, the danger that disputes turn violent.

The timing trap does not press with equal force everywhere, however. It bites hardest where disinformation is well organised, politics is deeply polarised and trust in institutions is low. Kenya in 2022 sat close to the worst case on all three counts: structured campaign operations producing false claims at speed, a presidential result decided by fewer than 250,000 votes out of more than 14 million, and an electoral commission that split in public days later.

Where claims spread more slowly, or feelings run cooler, honest corrections have more room to land. Ghana’s 2024 election illustrates this. A coalition of fact-checking organisations was in place before polling day, and the losing candidate conceded quickly rather than contesting the count. Where the result is not in dispute, my framework predicts that verification delays carry far less cost.

Knowing when the trap is tightest tells us where to concentrate effort.

What should be done?

1. Explainers to get ahead of falsehoods. Fact-checking organisations did this in 2022, publishing explainers on how tallying works and how forged documents are made before voting began. This work belongs with electoral commissions and public broadcasters, too, since they hold the procedural detail and national reach.

2. Keep the coalitions going. Kenya’s 2022 fact-checking coalition brought together Africa Check, PesaCheck, Debunk Media, mainstream newsrooms, community radio networks broadcasting in local languages and platform partnerships with Meta and Twitter. Sustaining this coalition between elections, rather than assembling it during one, falls to the fact-checking organisations that convene it and the donors that fund it.

3. Strengthen local knowledge. Kenyan fact-checkers relied on networks of contributors who could monitor claims in local languages. Sustaining this capacity needs investment and training from organisations and content platforms.

As Kenya returns to the polls in 2027, the deeper lesson is to change what we expect fact-checking to do. Its real value is not the instant rebuttal but the slow building of informational infrastructure – the archives, habits and public scepticism that a healthy democracy leans on over time.

The point is not that fact-checking failed in 2022. It is that it was placed at the wrong moment in the fight. Move it earlier, and surround it with other defences, and the timing trap starts to loosen its grip.

– Election misinformation spreads faster than facts can be checked: 3 insights from Kenya’s experience
– https://theconversation.com/election-misinformation-spreads-faster-than-facts-can-be-checked-3-insights-from-kenyas-experience-287529

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Phumezo Ntlatywa, Lecturer, Sol Plaatje University

Imagine receiving a message from your bank about suspicious activity on your account, only to discover that someone has accessed your personal information after an organisation you trusted suffered a data breach. Or finding that your medical records or identity details have been exposed online without your knowledge. As more South Africans use digital services for banking, healthcare, education and social media, such incidents are becoming an increasing concern.

Privacy breaches involving personal information do not affect everyone equally. Some people are more vulnerable than others because of their social circumstances, limited digital literacy, economic dependence, or the sensitive nature of the information they share online.

People who may be disproportionately affected include older adults who are less familiar with digital technologies, low-income communities with limited access to digital literacy programmes and children whose personal information is often shared by parents, schools or caregivers. People who rely on community organisations or informal support networks can also face privacy risks.

For example, a stokvel (community-based saving group) may collect members’ identity numbers and banking details to manage contributions, while neighbourhood lift clubs often share names, phone numbers and locations through messaging apps. These are everyday activities that depend on trust, making the responsible handling of personal information especially important. If this information is mishandled or exposed, the consequences can be significant for those involved.

When personal health information is compromised, the consequences can extend far beyond fraud or identity theft. People could be exposed to stigma, discrimination and loss of dignity.

I am a researcher whose work focuses on privacy and social media use in South Africa, particularly how people and communities share sensitive information online. In a recent study, I analysed published South African research on privacy and data protection to understand what scholars are studying, and what may be receiving less attention.

I found encouraging growth in this research in South Africa. Much of the work has focused on areas such as legal rules, cybersecurity measures that protect systems from attacks and organisational practices that help institutions handle information responsibly.

But important blind spots remain. Vulnerable groups receive limited attention in the research. The same is true for community structures such as non-profit organisations, civil society groups, community-based organisations and small enterprises. These institutions regularly handle sensitive personal information with limited resources, little compliance support and low public awareness of privacy risks.

This matters because research often shapes public discussion, policy priorities and awareness programmes. If vulnerable communities receive little attention in research, the challenges they face may also receive less visibility in efforts to improve privacy protection. Solutions won’t be reached with them in mind.

How privacy research changed after legislation

South Africa has legislation in place to protect sensitive information such as children’s data, health records and religious beliefs. The Protection of Personal Information Act (known as Popia) introduced major compliance requirements from July 2020, with full enforcement beginning in July 2021.

Popia has increased awareness of privacy responsibilities among organisations and created greater accountability for handling personal data. It also gives citizens stronger rights over their information. They are able to know how their data is being used and to challenge misuse.

The introduction of Popia brought about an increased focus on privacy scholarship. My analysis showed this moved through three distinct phases.

In the early period, 2013-2017, research focused mainly on understanding the newly enacted Popia and what it would mean for organisations. Much of the work examined the purpose, scope and obligations of the legislation while many of its substantive provisions had not yet come into operation. Keywords such as privacy, data protection and personal information dominated the conversation, reflecting efforts to interpret the new law and anticipate its practical implications.

During the middle period 2018-2020, the conversation broadened. Researchers explored the technical and organisational realities of protecting personal information. Topics that gained prominence included:

• cloud computing (storing and managing information online)

• cybersecurity (protecting systems and information from digital threats)

• ethics (ensuring information is used responsibly)

• institutional compliance (helping organisations follow privacy rules and regulations).

This signalled a shift from asking what the law meant to asking how organisations should put it into practice.

Following full enforcement of Popia, the period 2021-2025 saw a sharp increase in research output and a stronger focus on practical solutions. The analysis showed that studies began examining:

• compliance strategies (how to follow the law)

• ethical handling of data (collecting and using personal information responsibly)

• operational challenges in implementing privacy protections (practical difficulties of keeping information secure and complying with regulations).

New conversations started emerging around community-based compliance, non-profit organisations and public awareness programmes. This shows that South Africa’s privacy scholarship is evolving.

What South Africa studies most about privacy

The keyword analysis from my study helped identify themes and patterns in the scholarship.

The strongest themes in South African privacy research can be grouped into three broad areas:

• understanding privacy law

• developing technical safeguards

• helping organisations comply with legal requirements.

These are all essential areas of research. But they are not the whole picture.

Who is still missing from the conversation

Several important areas remain underexplored. One possible reason is that research often follows where funding, resources and expertise are concentrated. That is typically in larger organisations, government institutions and major urban centres. Smaller organisations and vulnerable communities may be less able to participate in research initiatives.

Sectoral gaps: Most research focuses on government institutions, corporations and formal organisational settings. Yet smaller organisations often collect highly sensitive personal information while operating with limited technical capacity and fewer compliance resources.

Disciplinary gaps: Much of the existing work comes from legal and technical perspectives. Comparatively little research explores privacy as a social, ethical or behavioural issue. This includes how ordinary people understand consent, digital trust, or their rights over personal information.

Geographical gaps: Research output is heavily concentrated in major urban centres in Gauteng and the Western Cape. This leaves other provinces underrepresented. It limits our understanding of privacy challenges in rural communities, smaller towns and under-resourced areas. In these regions, digital literacy, access and institutional capacity may differ significantly.

Citizen awareness gaps: In practice, privacy protection depends not only on regulation but also on whether citizens understand how their information is being used and what rights they have.

As more South Africans live, work and access services online, privacy protection cannot remain a conversation for lawyers, regulators and large organisations alone. It must also reflect the lived realities of vulnerable communities. A privacy system is only as strong as the protection it offers those most at risk.

– South Africa’s privacy laws are evolving, but vulnerable people are being left behind
– https://theconversation.com/south-africas-privacy-laws-are-evolving-but-vulnerable-people-are-being-left-behind-282439