Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Lesedi Senamele Matlala, Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Public Policy, Monitoring and Evaluations, University of Johannesburg

Government departments across South Africa are increasingly relying on digital tools to evaluate public programmes and monitor performance. This is part of broader public-sector reforms. Their aims are to improve accountability, respond to audit pressure and manage large-scale programmes with limited staff and budgets.

Here’s an example. National departments tracking housing delivery, social grants or infrastructure rollout rely on digital performance systems rather than periodic paper-based reports. Dashboards – a way of showing visual data in one place – provide near real-time updates on service delivery.

Another is the use platforms that collect mobile data. These allow frontline officials and contractors to upload information directly from the field.

Both examples lend themselves to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to process large datasets and generate insights that would previously have taken months to analyse.

This shift is often portrayed as a step forward for accountability and efficiency in the public sector.

I am a public policy scholar with a special interest in monitoring and evaluation of government programmes. My recent research shows a worrying trend, that the turn to technology is unfolding much quicker than the ethical and governance frameworks meant to regulate it.

Across the cases I’ve examined, digital tools were already embedded in routine monitoring and evaluation processes. But there weren’t clear standards guiding their use.

This presents risks around surveillance, exclusion, data misuse and poor professional judgement. These risks are not abstract. They shape how citizens experience the state, how their data is handled and whose voices ultimately count in policy decisions.

When technology outruns policy

Public-sector evaluation involves assessing government programmes and policies. It determines whether:

• public resources are used effectively

• programmes achieve their intended outcomes

• citizens can hold the state accountable for performance.

Traditionally, these evaluations relied on face-to-face engagement between communities, evaluators, government and others. They included qualitative methods that allowed for nuance, explanation and trust-building.

Digital tools have changed this.

In my research, I interviewed evaluators across government, NGOs, academia, professional associations and private consultancies. I found a consistent concern across the board. Digital systems are often introduced without ethical guidance tailored to evaluation practice.

Ethical guidance would provide clear, practical rules for how digital tools are used in evaluations. For example, when using dashboards or automated data analytics, guidance should require evaluators to explain how data are generated, who has access to them and how findings may affect communities being evaluated. It should also prevent the use of digital systems to monitor individuals without consent or to rank programmes in ways that ignore context.

South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act provides a general legal framework for data protection. But it doesn’t address the specific ethical dilemmas that arise when evaluation becomes automated, cloud-based and algorithmically mediated.

The result is that evaluators are often left navigating complex ethical terrain without clear standards. This forces institutions to rely on precedent, informal habits, past practices and software defaults.

Surveillance creep and data misuse

Digital platforms make it possible to collect large volumes of data. Once data is uploaded to cloud-based systems or third-party platforms, control over its storage, reuse and sharing frequently shifts from the evaluators to others.

Several evaluators described situations where data they’d collected on behalf of government departments was later reused by the departments or other state agencies. This was done without participants’ explicit awareness. Consent processes in digital environments are often reduced to a single click.

Examples of other uses included other forms of analysis, reporting or institutional monitoring.

One of the ethical risks that came out of the research was the use of this data for surveillance. This is the use of data to monitor individuals, communities or frontline workers.

Digital exclusion and invisible voices

Digital evaluation tools are often presented as expanding reach and participation. But in practice, they can exclude already marginalised groups. Communities with limited internet access, low digital literacy, language barriers or unreliable infrastructure are less likely to participate fully in digital evaluations.

Automated tools have limitations. For example, they may struggle to process multilingual data, local accents or culturally specific forms of expression. This leads to partial or distorted representations of lived experience. Evaluators in my study saw this happening in practice.

This exclusion has serious consequences especially in a country with inequality like South Africa. Evaluations that rely heavily on digital tools might find urban, connected populations and make rural or informal communities statistically invisible.

This is not merely a technical limitation. It shapes which needs are recognised and whose experiences inform policy decisions. If evaluation data underrepresents the most vulnerable, public programmes may appear more effective than they are. This masks structural failures rather than addressing them.

In my study, some evaluations reported positive performance trends despite evaluators noting gaps in data collection.

Algorithms are not neutral

Evaluators also raised concerns about the growing authority granted to algorithmic outputs. Dashboards, automated reports and AI-driven analytics are often treated as the true picture. This happens even when they conflict with field-based knowledge or contextual understanding.

For example, dashboards may show a target as on track. But in an example of a site visit, evaluators my find flaws or dissatisfaction.

Several participants reported pressure from funders or institutions to rely on the analysis of the numbers.

Yet algorithms reflect the assumptions, datasets and priorities embedded in their design. When applied uncritically, they can reproduce bias, oversimplify social dynamics and disregard qualitative insight.

If digital systems dictate how data must be collected, analysed and reported, evaluators risk becoming technicians and not independent professionals exercising judgement.

Why Africa needs context-sensitive ethics

Across Africa, national strategies and policies on digital technologies often borrow heavily from international frameworks. These are developed in very different contexts. Global principles on AI ethics and data governance provide useful reference points. But they don’t adequately address the realities of inequality, historical mistrust and uneven digital access across much of Africa’s public sector.

My research argues that ethical governance for digital evaluation must be context-sensitive. Standards must address:

• how consent is obtained

• who owns evaluation data

• how algorithmic tools are selected and audited

• how evaluator independence is protected.

Ethical frameworks must be embedded at the design stage of digital systems.

– Digital monitoring is growing in South Africa’s public service – regulation needs to catch up
– https://theconversation.com/digital-monitoring-is-growing-in-south-africas-public-service-regulation-needs-to-catch-up-273288

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, Professor of Practice, International Human Rights Law, Tufts University

In a rapidly fracturing world, regional integration could be a source of resilience for the African continent.

The African Union agreed in 2019 to establish the African Continental Free Trade Area founded on the building blocks laid by eight regional economic communities. These are the Arab Maghreb Union, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa), the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (Cen-Sad), the East African Community (EAC), the Economic Community of Central African States (Eccas), the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

But integration has made slow progress.

The World Bank issued a report 45 years ago which said a larger regional market would increase production and reduce “long-term obstacles to development”. Those obstacles included infrastructure deficits, payment and settlement systems, and political risk.

They persist to this day. Based on my research over more than three decades of work on regionalism in Africa, I suggest there are four main reasons why.

• Integration experiments suffer from colonial dependency.

• Integration has failed to address the informal nature of enterprise in Africa.

• African countries do integration as an add-on to pre-existing colonial arrangements, instead of re-imagining them.

• Regional integration in Africa has been burdened by mission creep, which makes its goals unclear.

I argue that institutions created by Africa’s leaders for this purpose must facilitate the continent as a space in which every African can thrive and diminish the tendency for national politics to trump shared progress.

The burden of colonial dependency

At the conclusion of the Berlin West Africa Conference in February 1885, European powers and the United States of America appointed themselves “to regulate the conditions most favourable to the development of trade and civilization … in Africa.”

In 1973, a pioneering study of Foreign Investments in the East African Common Market concluded that most of Africa’s post-colonial regional integration arrangements were “based on pre-independence links and institutions.”

For instance, the East African Common Market was successor to Britain’s colonial East African Federation and precursor of today’s East African Community. The Community’s recent effort to expand beyond this original geography has come at the price of cohesion, which endangers it.

Ecowas was the first to transcend patterns of colonial dependency. Uniquely, it included countries that won their independence from France, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Fifty years after Ecowas was founded, recent developments suggest the experience continues to be uneasy.

One reason for this is because the post-colonial association or partnership agreements between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries is designed to farm and extract goods that are sent to be processed in Europe. From there, African countries import the processed goods at higher prices. This makes it impossible for Africa to grow industries that can employ its own people to process what it produces.

Informal nature of business activity

Around Africa, colonial rule thrived by routing or taking over indigenous enterprise. Those who survived it did so by going underground or operating informally. Since independence, most governments in the continent have failed to redress this historical pattern criminalising African enterprise.

As recently as 2023, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa estimated informal cross-border trade in Africa at “between 30% and 72% of formal trade between neighbouring countries.” This excludes a huge proportion of African enterprise from the benefits of regional integration.

Integration as an add on, instead of a shared future

African countries continue to enter into regional integration not to re-imagine but as add-ons to pre-existing colonial arrangements. Recent estimates put the number of these arrangements at over 156. For a continent of 55 countries, this means confounding overlaps of both membership and mission.

In response, many have advocated rationalisation of Africa’s regional integration arrangements.

The AU’s decision to recognise eight regional economic communities was supposed to respond to this. But it has not eliminated the overlaps. For instance, Tanzania and the DRC respectively belong to the EAC and SADC. Eritrea and Sudan were simultaneously in the IGAD, Comesa, and Cen-Sad. French-speaking west African countries belong to both Ecowas and the Economic and Monetary Union of West Africa, better known as l’UEMOA.

What needs to happen next

Popular resentment against continuing colonial projects in parts of Africa may be high but it requires political imagination to transform that into constructive energy.

Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger exited Ecowas following rupture in relations with the colonial power, France. However, they still belong to l’UEMOA, whose currency system is backed by France.

It will take more than formal rules of market access or tax harmonisation to shrink informal trade. Women, for example, do over 70% of informal cross-border trade in Africa. An effective solution to this problem will require better frontier regimes and eliminate policies that discourage women from lawful enterprise.

Addressing mission creep

Rationalisation of Africa’s integration arrangements may already be quietly underway. Much of the focus is on membership overlaps. Since 2000, for instance, Ecowas has lost 25% of its membership, reducing it from 16 to 12 member states. Rwanda has withdrawn from Eccas and Eritrea from IGAD.

But the problem may be lack of clarity in the mission of Africa’s integration arrangements. In addition to economic issues, Africa’s regional integration regimes have also assumed burdens of collective security and governance oversight. The outcomes have been both unconvincing and destabilising. The exit in 2025 of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger from Ecowas is a recent example.

Without a clear political commitment to a shared future, Africa’s governments have been unable to manage the contradictions between economic integration, collective security and governance in one mission. The time has come for them to decide what they must prioritise so that regional integration in Africa will finally get the opportunity to prove and improve the continent’s prospects.

– Africa’s trade blocs were designed to unite the continent: four reasons they haven’t delivered
– https://theconversation.com/africas-trade-blocs-were-designed-to-unite-the-continent-four-reasons-they-havent-delivered-274471