DIGITAL DEMOCRACY
Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age | The Report of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age
Author(s)
- Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Nathaniel Persily, Alex Stamos, Stephan Stedman
- Laura Chinchilla, Yves Leterme, Noeleen Heyzer, Ory Okolloh, William Sweeney, Megan Smith, Ernesto Zedillo
New information and communication technologies (ICTs) pose difficult challenges for electoral integrity. In recent years foreign governments have used social media and the Internet to interfere in elections around the globe. Disinformation has been weaponized to discredit democratic institutions, sow societal distrust, and attack political candidates. Social media has proved a useful tool for extremist groups to send messages of hate and to incite violence. Democratic governments strain to respond to a revolution in political advertising brought about by ICTs. Electoral integrity has been at risk from attacks on the electoral process, and on the quality of democratic deliberation.
The relationship between the Internet, social media, elections, and democracy is complex, systemic, and unfolding. Our ability to assess some of the most important claims about social media is constrained by the unwillingness of the major platforms to share data with researchers. Nonetheless, we are confident about several important findings.
DIGITAL ECONOMY
Digital Economy Report 2019| Value Creation and Capture: Implications for Developing Countries
Author(s)
- United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
The Digital Economy Report (2019) examines the scope for value creation and capture in the digital economy by developing countries. It gives special attention to opportunities for these countries to take advantage of the data-driven economy as producers and innovators – but also to the constraints they face – notably with regard to digital data and digital platforms. This topic is timely, as only a decade remains for achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Digital disruptions have already led to the creation of enormous wealth in record time, but this is highly concentrated in a small number of countries, companies and individuals. Meanwhile, digitalization has also given rise to fundamental challenges for policymakers in countries at all levels of development. Harnessing its potential for the many, and not just the few, requires creative thinking and policy experimentation. And it calls for greater global cooperation to avoid widening the income gap.
Digital Economy Blue Print
Powering Kenya’s Transformation
Author(s)
- Government of Kenya: Ministry of Information Communications and Technology (MoICT)
This Blueprint seeks to provide a conceptual framework adopted by Kenya in its quest towards the realization of a successful and sustainable digital economy. It commences with a brief overview of the digital economy ecosystem, and then proceeds to highlight the importance of investing in a digital economy, where some valuable statistics are provided on the relative value of global investments in mobile services systems mainly within financial markets, e-commerce platforms, among others. Adoption of the Digital Economy framework offers countries like Kenya opportunities to leapfrog and join nations in the First World and actively contribute to the global economy.
The Blueprint identifies the five pillars of the digital economy, that are described under the headings, Digital Government, Digital Business, Infrastructure, Innovation-Driven Entrepreneurship and Digital Skills and Values.
Each of these five pillars is comprehensively explored, complete with illustrative tables. The description of the pillars is followed by proposed implementation ideas that include, creating a regulatory framework for investments and innovations, encouraging smart society and networks, strengthening privacy and data protection, enabling new business models for micro and small enterprises and striving for excellence in digital technology research and innovative ecosystems.
The Utility and Viability of Digital Technologies in the Production and Distribution of Critical Content in East Africa: An Exploratory Study by Hivos
Editor(s)
- Gilbert Nyamweya and Moses Otsieno
This research report explores the utility and viability of digital technologies in the production and
promotion of critical audio-visual content by creatives in East Africa. More specifically, it establishes
regional trends in the creative sector with regard to uptake of technology in the development of critical
content; highlight policy and regulatory frameworks for digital technologies and their implication to
production, promotion and consumption of critical content in the region; it documents opportunities for
policy development and stakeholder engagement in the use of digital technologies in the production and
promotion of critical content and provide recommendations to increase uptake of digital technologies for
the production of critical audio-visual content by makers.
DIGITAL FUTURE
The age of digital interdependence
Report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation
Author(s)
- United Nations
The report highlights issues that emerged from the Panel’s deliberations, setting out the backdrop for the recommendations in the final chapter. Our report does not aim to be comprehensive – some important topics are touched briefly or not at all – but to focus on areas where we felt digital cooperation could make the greatest difference. These chapters deal broadly with the areas of economics, society and governance, while noting that many issues – such as capacity, infrastructure and data – are relevant to all.
Chapter 2, Leaving No One Behind, assesses the contribution of digital technologies to the Sustainable Development Goals. It addresses issues including financial inclusion, affordable and meaningful access to the internet, the future of education and jobs and the need for regional and global economic policy cooperation.
Chapter 3, Individuals, Societies and Digital Technologies, discusses the application of human rights to the digital age, the need to keep human rights and human agency at the centre of technological development, and the imperative to improve cooperation on digital security and trust.
Chapter 4, Mechanisms for Global Digital Cooperation, identifies gaps in current mechanisms of global digital cooperation, the functions of digital cooperation and principles digital cooperation should aim to follow, provides three options for potential new global digital cooperation architectures, and discusses the role of the United Nations in promoting digital cooperation.
Drawing on the analysis in the preceding chapters, Chapter 5 shares and explains our Recommendations for shaping our common digital future
THE DRAFT DIGITALTRANSFORMATION STRATEGY FOR AFRICA (2020-2030)
Author(s)
- African Union
Africa presents a sea of economic opportunities in virtually every sector, and the continent’s youthful population structure is an enormous opportunity in this digital era and hence the need for Africa to make digitally enabled socio-economic development a high priority. Digital Transformation is a driving force for innovative, inclusive and sustainable growth. Innovations and digitalization are stimulating job creation and contributing to addressing poverty, reducing inequality, facilitating the delivery of goods and services, and contributing to the achievement of Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Furthermore, Africa has less legacy challenges to deal with and is therefore adopting digitized solutions faster out of necessity. For Africa, the current moment offers a leapfrogging opportunity. Today’s technologies indicate the scale and speed at which technology is transforming traditional socio-economic sectors.
Recognizing the efforts of the continent’s leadership to prioritize and accelerate digital transformation, and building on the vision of many African leaders, African countries are ready for a comprehensive digital transformation strategy to guide a common, coordinated response to reap the benefits of the fourth industrial revolution.
AI Ethics and Human Rights: Promises and perils of advancements in Artificial intelligence
Author(s)
- Moses Otsieno
Artificial intelligence is already making a positive impact on society, addressing the many socio-
economic problems humanity faces. Simultaneously, AI presents numerous intractable threats. Yet, there
are no globally agreed mechanisms that ensure responsible development and deployment of AI. This
research paper assesses the benefits and threats that AI poses in the fields of ethics and human rights,
highlighting key questions around discrimination and algorithmic injustice, inequalities and human
responsibility, democratic assault, lack of voice and power imbalances within the global AI discourse.
Thereafter, provides recommendations and a forward-looking approach on how to encourage the
community of AI developers and the private sector to keep in mind ethical and human rights
considerations when developing the technologies. These include protecting the public against harmful
effects of AI, providing investment opportunities where AI shows promise to positively impact on
peoples’ lives and develop the capabilities of users to live in an AI world.
Artificial Intelligence and Public Service Delivery: The use of AI in Allocation of Social Benefits
Author(s)
- Moses Otsieno
More and more countries across the globe are turning to AI-systems to assist in the allocation,
management or termination of social benefits for citizens. These types of AI-systems perform or assist in
the governmental task of adjudication: the granting of benefits or rights to citizens. While there are
advantages to the use of AI-systems for this purpose, this algorithmic turn in social benefits allocation
also presents many ethical, legal and societal challenges. This policy brief highlights the importance of
adequately identify these challenges in order to mitigate risks.
RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL ERA
Data Protection and Privacy in Beneficial Ownership Disclosure (2019)
Author(s)
- The Engine Room, OpenOwnership and The B Team
Over the past few years, a range of stakeholders, from business to civil society, have promoted public disclosure of beneficial ownership information. The push for public disclosure of beneficial ownership of companies may have many explanations and drivers, but it is founded in great part on a simple proposition: in exchange for the right to a substantial ownership stake in a company – with all the benefits of protection from personal liability that this brings – an owner should reveal their identity. There is nothing inherent to the task of owning a company that would require information about that ownership to be kept private; indeed, there are many proud business owners across the world. Furthermore, because owning a company comes with considerable benefits including limited liability, it is reasonable for authorities to ask for ownership transparency as a quid pro quo. While there is important momentum toward legal frameworks requiring more ownership transparency, the move towards collection and publication of beneficial ownership information – particularly its availability in public registers – has its critics. One stumbling block which has emerged is the issue of privacy. Because beneficial ownership data includes data about people, the concern is that the publishing of beneficial ownership information could interfere with or threaten individuals’ rights to privacy and the protection of their personal data. This raises strict legal considerations. Do beneficial ownership registers contravene or conflict with data protection and privacy laws? But it also raises broader questions about whether making beneficial ownership information public is necessary to meet policy goals.
This paper sets out and discusses these questions, evaluating them through the perspective of international human rights law.
AGILE GOVERNANCE AND JUSTICE
Big Data from the South(s): Beyond Data Universalism (2019)
Author(s)
- Stefania Milan & Emiliano Trere
This article introduces the tenets of a theory of datafication of and in the Souths. It calls for a de-Westernization of critical data studies, in view of promoting reparation to the cognitive injustice that fails to recognize non-mainstream ways of knowing the world through data. It situates the “Big Data from the South” research agenda as an epistemological, ontological, and ethical program and outlines five conceptual operations to shape this agenda. First, it suggests moving past the “universalism” associated with our interpretations of datafication. Second, it advocates understanding the South as a composite and plural entity, beyond the geographical connotation (i.e., “global South”). Third, it postulates a critical engagement with the decolonial approach. Fourth, it argues for the need to bring agency to the core of our analyses. Finally, it suggests embracing the imaginaries of datafication emerging from the Souths, foregrounding empowering ways of thinking data from the margins.
Decolonizing Privacy Studies (2018)
Author(s)
- Payal Arora
This paper calls for an epistemic disobedience in privacy studies by decolonizing the approach to privacy. As technology companies expand their reach worldwide, the notion of privacy continues to be viewed through an ethnocentric lens. It disproportionately draws from empirical evidence on Western-based, white, and middle-class demographics. We need to break away from the market-driven neoliberal ideology and the Development paradigm long dictating media studies if we are to foster more inclusive privacy policies. This paper offers a set of propositions to de-naturalize and estrange data from demographic generalizations and cultural assumptions, namely, (1) predicting privacy harms through the history of social practice, (2) recalibrating the core-periphery as evolving and moving targets, and (3) de-exoticizing “natives” by situating privacy in ludic digital cultures. In essence, decolonizing privacy studies is as much an act of reimagining people and place as it is of dismantling essentialisms that are regurgitated through scholarship.
Democratic governance in an age of datafication: Lessons from mapping government discourses and practices
Author(s)
- Joanna Redden
In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.
The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.
Democratic governance in an age of datafication: Lessons from mapping government discourses and practices
Author(s)
- Joanna Redden
There is an abundance of enthusiasm and optimism about how governments at all levels can make use of big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence. There is also growing concern about the risks that come with these new systems. This article makes the case for greater government transparency and accountability about uses of big data through a Government of Canada qualitative research case study. Adapting a method from critical cartographers, I employ counter-mapping to map government big data practices and internal discussions of risk and challenge. I do so by drawing on interviews and freedom of information requests. The analysis reveals that there are more concerns and risks than often publicly discussed and that there are significant areas of silence that need greater attention. The article underlines the need for our democratic systems to respond to our new datafied contexts by ensuring that our institutions make changes to better protect citizen rights, uphold democratic principles and ensure means for citizen intervention.
Mapping of the Open Data Ecosystem in Kenya
Author(s)
- Moses Otsieno
The study finds that that despite the huge progress in technology and data initiatives in Kenya,
there are still a lot of challenges with usage of data in terms of informing policy making,
especially at the county level. Most of these challenges emanate from lack of coordination
mechanisms and political will to translate the progressive written rules and laws into practice.
Infommediaries have an opportunity to enhance data for policy making and practice on two main
fronts. These include, working with data generators that are active at both the national and
county levels, such as the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics to innovate into how to best
generate disaggregated data that includes gender and other forms of marginality; and to work
with theme-based networks at county level to develop effective advocacy strategies beyond
taking officials to courts.