Rethinking Norm-Setting in Africa’s Digital Present

Dr. Leah Junck is head of research at the Global Center on AI Governance (GCG), which receives support from foundations and corporations. The report referenced here was funded by Luminate and produced by the research team of the Global Center on AI Governance and the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria.

RightsCon, the annual gathering of digital and human rights experts planned for May in Zambia, would have been one of the rare moments to place the question of how digital rights are actually being made in African contexts squarely on the center stage. But the gathering was canceled following reported Chinese pressure on the Zambian government. But pursuing this issue is nevertheless crucial, as global debates on AI tend to cast Africa as a landscape of opportunity and risk—but rarely as a site of normative authority. It is a sentiment that is recycled through narrow reportage on tech developments or governance milestones and that effectively obscures the lived realities of how harms unfold and how justice is pursued in practice on the continent. The ambiguity produced as a result travels: individuals in Africa are unsure how to seek redress, private sector actors define fairness largely on their own terms, and civic spaces, through which claims can be voiced, find themselves increasingly constrained.

The Global Center on AI Governance’s recent report, “Tech Justice in Africa,” shows that examining Africa’s digital ecosystems through concrete actions offers a far more dynamic picture of what tech realities are—and what they could become. This matters not only for African publics, including a large young and tech‑curious generation challenging dominant narratives. It also matters for global policymakers, investors, and philanthropies whose strategies depend on African resources including labor and data.

While AI adoption is accelerating across Africa, 30 of the 40 assessed countries still lack robust safeguards, according to the 2024 Global Index on Responsible AI (with a new edition forthcoming). The result is a widening gap between the spread of AI systems and the protection of the continent’s people. Yet it must also be recognized that AI ethics frameworks are prone to being a mere façade if they ignore the specificities of local contexts and the ongoing ways colonial memory plays out in digital systems and governance as lived experiences.

In a region that has long subsumed the costs of tech development with its environments, workers, and populations being disproportionately affected, a lack of global understanding is hardly accidental but reflects enduring power relations determining whose experiences count and binary portrayals of histories as either static or overly optimistic. Shifting the focus requires scrutinizing tensions between local efforts towards tech justice and how justice materializes (or fails to) in practice. Across the continent, governments, activists, grassroots technologists, and researchers are contesting unjust dynamics around tech development and use. These efforts, however, are routinely slowed by under‑resourced institutions, incentives that privilege profit over people next to rights-inspired regulations that lack enforceability.

As a process of interaction and contestation, tech justice is never fully absent or present. It is continually shaped by those challenging hegemonic narratives of technology and development. And although harms are experienced as a farrago and cannot be neatly separated by category or group, justice-seeking work still often unfolds in institutional and thematic silos. A key lesson from the report, then, is that situating social justice and digital rights both within specific cases and ecosystems helps spotlight critical areas of attention and potential. It shows how ideals and institutional practices must align to protect citizens from overlapping tech harms. The power of the market, the promise of harmonized regulation, institutional strengthening, and efforts to make local experiences more visible all need to be folded into central conversations on responsible AI in Africa. As major destinations for tech investment with growing experience in navigating the socio-environmental side‑effects of tech, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa offer especially valuable insights.

Why a historic contextualization matters for tech justice

AI development shows a clear continuation and a normalization of extractive practices across Africa. Today’s patterns of digital inequity must therefore be read alongside the long-standing framing of Africa as “other” to more established global powers, resulting in the continent being treated as less worthy of critical attention beyond external economic interests. Assumptions embedded in the digital economy—natural resources treated as up for grabs, labor and data seen as not requiring fair compensation, among others—mirror dynamics dating back to the colonial partition of Africa. What has been termed “digital colonialism” follows familiar routes, sometimes quite literally, with undersea cables tracing pathways once used in the slave trade.

Acknowledging this history is essential for grasping the central role of capital, infrastructure, and Big Tech business models that remain out of tune with local realities. It also clarifies the need for decision‑making practices that actively counter these long-standing trends, whether they are intentionally reproduced or simply carried forward through gaping informational landscapes and institutional inertia.

Country snapshots: harm and possibility

Across Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, the tech justice ecosystem shows just how harms and opportunities become two parts of the same coin in digital system development. Civil society in all three countries is vibrant and technically sophisticated, yet constrained by shrinking civic spaces and donors determining agendas based on profit interests, rather than cooperation.

In Nigeria, a lively tech sector coexists with extraction and harmful, unjust labor conditions, exemplified by ride-hailing drivers being disciplined by opaque algorithms that determine pay and access to work. Kenya’s widespread connectivity has enabled powerful forms of civic and feminist organizing as seen in the #EndFemicideKE and #RejectFinanceBill2024 movements. However, the same digital tools have exposed women to online violence, subjected activists to heightened surveillance and, through their growing relevance in political information flows in combination with moves to digitize public services, contribute to a gradual erasure of rural community needs.

Meanwhile, South Africa represents a paradox of strong articulated justice norms living alongside fragile practices. The country is considered a leader on the continent in terms of responsible AI and digital competition. But persistent inequalities and language barriers mean that many people still experience the digital economy as extractive rather than empowering. Gesturing towards hope is the trend that South African-led tech initiatives offer the most protections to workers.

Across these ecosystems, tech justice hinges less on access to tools than on power—on whose well‑being digital systems are designed to serve and on whether institutions can meaningfully carry principles through to the people whose lives are shaped by tech.

Insights from other countries

Other African countries offer examples of how state-led governance and civil society as well as tech start initiatives can overlap in ways that could be justice strengthening. In Ghana, misinformation during elections, resulting in biased coverage and harassment, have been met through ‘Fact‑CheckingCoalitions’ involving multiple partners including media organisations, alongside public education efforts.

Pilots such as drone-driven medicine delivery into hard-to-reach areas in Uganda show the potential for access—but a closer look at community acceptance, the insufficiency of regulations around access and data safety, and the typically short-term nature of such investments reveals significant pitfalls.

Mali’s move from French to indigenous languages required new curricula to be built from scratch. RobotsMali used AI to produce culturally relevant materials rooted in community expectations as a fast‑track, locally driven response to governance change but only sustained support for educators and long‑term equity planning will determine whether such initiatives can scale fairly.

Uber’s acquisition of Careem in Egypt rendered evident the impact of market driven power. Even with conditions imposed by the national competition authority, including limits on pricing and closer oversight of data practices, the merger still concentrated power in ways that may worsen conditions for drivers and increase corporate control over consumer data.

Justice through foresight

Court cases challenging shutdowns, digital surveillance, competition, labor and consumer rights show that governance is not static but continually informed by ongoing contestation of what has become normalized. Regional bodies such as the African Court and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights play important agenda‑setting roles. Nonetheless, much of the justice-seeking work sits with national institutions as systems often least equipped to respond.

Justice, as it stands, is usually pursued only once harm has occurred. When action is set in motion, the wheels of justice turn slowly. For tech justice to be experienced, governance must become more foresight-oriented particularly in areas such as labour and health, where AI systems are having an increasingly marked impact. A wait‑and‑see approach toward harm relies on a notion of disposability of those already positioned at the margins. Beyond being anticipatory, approaches countering this ought to be grounded in qualitative insight from those most impacted by tech (and those who represent them) and brought into policy and tech design discussions before weighty decisions are made.

Defining ‘tech justice’ through practice

With growing internet penetration across Africa, hopes for more inclusion are also on the rise. Continental influence on decisions around tech design and implementation, in spite of this and efforts to localize data storage and cloud capacity, remains largely narrowed to key regions and governance moments while infrastructural dependency largely persists.

One reason is that inclusion and tech justice are embedded in externally driven politics that define meaningful use. Reducing these terms to the mere presence or absence of tech and certain pieces of legislation is therefore not very telling. It is necessary to make room for a more critical, practice-grounded evaluation of “tech justice,” without which ambitious government efforts throughout the region may fail.

As regulation forms part of broader normative work and narrative-building, pertinent questions remain, such as:: How do regional and national regulations speak to one another and how can they be harmonized and actioned? How do they frame issues? This is highly relevant as failing to address these questions leaves room for loopholes for surveillance and information control in the name of security, or definitions of labor that fail to include platform work.

Enforceability and power are, hence, more than abstract governance topics but correlate with pressing locally specific issues and lived experiences. The GCG report shows that regarding the pursuit of tech justice as a translation process toward fairer futures is far from straightforward when transparency, visibility, and avenues for redress are abstracted and policy implementation falls short. African Union‑level efforts often stall due to limited country‑level action, with cross‑cutting organizations lacking resources, training, and mandates. Meanwhile, “soft laws” establish ideals but fail to track action or enforce penalties. For courts, this means holding a crucial but uncomfortable role: being essential for remedy yet often too underfunded or lacking independence to effectively ensure it. For those affected, justice, if it arrives, may come long after harm is done.

Rethinking norm-setting

AI development in Africa is drawing more and more investment interest, but its significance goes beyond narrow profit-making. Against the backdrop of a young population and the co-existence of tech optimism with persistent justice-seeking efforts, it is a promising, albeit still influentially lopsided, context for more just tech futures to be realized.

Currently, norm-setting in Africa’s digital present is less informed by tweaking best practices and more so by the fundamental power structures that determine who sets the terms and tone, whose knowledge is valued, and which harms are recognized as requiring remedy. This is important to recognize when doing the much‑needed work of holding governments accountable not only for the actions they take, but also for those they have yet to take—and for the pace at which all of this unfolds.

The report points towards several priority areas for rethinking whose understandings of tech justice matter: long‑term investment in public digital literacy and rights awareness; support for legal expertise and litigation; regional model frameworks attentive to intersecting harms; and resourcing research, documentation, and convening that bridges technical, legal, and organizing expertise. Strengthening regional coalitions that can translate norms into practice is equally critical, as are concrete implementation plans with clearly defined roles and responsibilities.

If tech justice is to become more than a rhetorical commitment, it must be treated as a living and contested process—one that requires close attention to who participates (including in African Union–level processes) and whose absence has long become inconspicuous. It also requires long‑term, flexible funding for community‑led initiatives. Above all, it demands that the abstractions needed to impact communities at scale remain grounded in the realities of people whose lives are already being impacted by digital systems and who, despite structural constraints, continue to imagine and enact more just alternatives for themselves and future generations.