Appropriating Technology

This blog is based on my input to the ICT4D-North workshop at Salford University. I was asked, “What are some emerging risks or blind spots in global digital inclusion efforts that we should be paying more attention to?” One blind spot is how digital inclusion projects work as a form of ‘anti-politics’. As you know, James Ferguson argued that the development industry often functions as an “anti-politics machine”. He argued that the development industry oversimplifies complex socio-economic problems and offers…

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Read my article on digital social protection systems in the Conversation and join in the discussion: We conducted the largest study of its kind in 2023 through surveys and focus groups with domestic, disabled, migrant and home-based workers in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia bringing together organisations championing African workers’ rights, disability rights and digital rights. In speaking to workers’ leaders, civil society groups and government agencies administering social insurance systems, it became clear that the…

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The growth in the popularity of the internet around the world, as evidenced by growing user numbers, particularly in Africa, has enabled citizens to harness its power as a tool of agency, creating new global and transnational spaces for civic participation, advocacy, and social change…

Governments around the world use surveillance technology to monitor external threats to national security. Some African governments are also spending vast sums on mass surveillance of their own citizens.

They are using mobile phone spyware, internet interception devices, social media monitoring and biometric identity systems. Artificial intelligence for facial recognition and car number plate recognition is another digital surveillance technology in their growing toolkit…

This week the UK is set to host its first AI Safety Summit. It aims to bring together international governments, leading AI companies, civil society groups and research experts to consider the risks of AI and how they can be mitigated through governance and international collaboration.
Street surveillance camera and graphical representation of facial recognition screening…

Mobile SIM registration linked to digital ID is causing exclusion of marginalised groups, and concerns about privacy in the absence of sufficient legal safeguards, especially in nations with a history of abuse by authorities…

On paper, citizen’s privacy rights are well protected throughout Africa. They are explicitly written into constitutions, international human rights conventions and domestic law. But, in the first comparative review of privacy protections across Africa we found that governments ignore the law to to carry out illegal digital surveillance of their citizens. What’s more, they are doing so with impunity…

State surveillance of citizens extends far beyond Pegasus spyware, the software developed by the Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group. There is a multi-million-pound global market in which companies compete to profit from helping states to illegally spy on their own citizens…