Cross-border data flows in Africa: Continental ambitions and political realities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Melody Musoni, Poorva Karkare and Chloe Teevan: “Africa must prioritise data usage and cross-border data sharing to realise the goals of the African Continental Free Trade Area and to drive innovation and AI development. Accessible and shareable data is essential for the growth and success of the digital economy, enabling innovations and economic opportunities, especially in a rapidly evolving landscape.

African countries, through the African Union (AU), have a common vision of sharing data across borders to boost economic growth. However, the adopted continental digital policies are often inconsistently applied at the national level, where some member states implement restrictive measures like data localisation that limit the free flow of data.

The paper looks at national policies that often prioritise domestic interests and how those conflict with continental goals. This is due to differences in political ideologies, socio-economic conditions, security concerns and economic priorities. This misalignment between national agendas and the broader AU strategy is shaped by each country’s unique context, as seen in the examples of Senegal, Nigeria and Mozambique, which face distinct challenges in implementing the continental vision.

The paper concludes with actionable recommendations for the AU, member states and the partnership with the European Union. It suggests that the AU enhances support for data-sharing initiatives and urges member states to focus on policy alignment, address data deficiencies, build data infrastructure and find new ways to use data. It also highlights how the EU can strengthen its support for Africa’s datasharing goals…(More)”.

The paradox of climate data in West Africa: growing urgency coupled with diminishing accessibility

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cirad: “In 2022, a prolonged drought devastated maize crops in northern Burkina Faso, leaving two million people without sufficient food resources. This dramatic situation could have been better anticipated and its impacts could have been mitigated with the collection and equitable sharing of specific data: that of agrometeorology, the science that studies the effects of meteorological, climatological and hydrological factors on crops.

Although it is too late to prevent the 2022 drought, protecting people from future droughts remains an urgent priority, especially in Africa, a continent where climate change poses a serious threat to rainfed agriculture, its main agricultural and economic activity.

To anticipate these climate risks, it is essential to have access to reliable meteorological data, which is crucial for ensuring sustainable and resilient agricultural practices. Yet in West Africa, the accessibility and reliability of this data are increasingly threatened and face unprecedented diplomatic, economic and security challenges…(More)”.

Crowdfunding Education

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Victoria Goldiee: “Nigeria’s education system has declined due to inadequate funding and facilities, low admission rates, and a nationwide shortage of qualified teachers. Consequently, receiving a quality education has become a privilege only accessible to families with financial means. According to research by the Nigeria Education and Training Services Industry, 49 percent of Nigeria’s youth enter into trade apprenticeships or expatriate to pursue a better education. In fact, Nigeria has the highest percentage of its students overseas of any African nation.

In February 2016, social entrepreneur Bola Lawal turned to crowdfunding to make educational opportunities accessible to Nigerians. He founded ScholarX as the vehicle to realize this mission through taking advantage of the largely untapped market of unclaimed scholarships, educational grants, and philanthropic donations for African students. The X in ScholarX represents the missing value and recognition that Nigerian youth deserve for their dedication to academic achievement.

“The idea for ScholarX came from the conversation with my friends on our shared experiences,” Lawal recounts, “because I also had difficulty paying for school like millions of Nigerians.” He adds that he was “even suspended from school because” of his inability to pay the tuition fee.

Like Lawal, more than 100,000 Nigerian students overseas rely on scholarships, many of which are backed either by oil and gas companies that aim to recruit students into the industry or by federal government grants for local students. But in recent years, these scholarships have been scaled back or scrapped altogether because of the ongoing economic crisis and recession. The crash of the foreign exchange rate of Nigeria’s currency, the naira, has further threatened the prospects of Nigeria’s overseas students, leaving many unable to pay tuition…(More)”

Why is it so hard to establish the death toll?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Smriti Mallapaty: “Given the uncertainty of counting fatalities during conflict, researchers use other ways to estimate mortality.

One common method uses household surveys, says Debarati Guha-Sapir, an epidemiologist who specializes in civil conflicts at the University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, and is based in Brussels. A sample of the population is asked how many people in their family have died over a specific period of time. This approach has been used to count deaths in conflicts elsewhere, including in Iraq3 and the Central African Republic4.

The situation in Gaza right now is not conducive to a survey, given the level of movement and displacement, say researchers. And it would be irresponsible to send data collectors into an active conflict and put their lives at risk, says Ball.

There are also ethical concerns around intruding on people who lack basic access to food and medication to ask about deaths in their families, says Jamaluddine. Surveys will have to wait for the conflict to end and movement to ease, say researchers.

Another approach is to compare multiple independent lists of fatalities and calculate mortality from the overlap between them. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group used this approach to estimate the number of people killed in Syria between 2011 and 2014. Jamaluddine hopes to use the ministry fatality data in conjunction with those posted on social media by several informal groups to estimate mortality in this way. But Guha-Sapir says this method relies on the population being stable and not moving around, which is often not the case in conflict-affected communities.

In addition to deaths immediately caused by the violence, some civilians die of the spread of infectious diseases, starvation or lack of access to health care. In February, Jamaluddine and her colleagues used modelling to make projections of excess deaths due to the war and found that, in a continued scenario of six months of escalated conflict, 68,650 people could die from traumatic injuries, 2,680 from non-communicable diseases such as cancer and 2,720 from infectious diseases — along with thousands more if an epidemic were to break out. On 30 July, the ministry declared a polio epidemic in Gaza after detecting the virus in sewage samples, and in mid-August it confirmed the first case of polio in 25 years, in a 10-month-old baby…

The longer the conflict continues, the harder it will be to get reliable estimates, because “reports by survivors get worse as time goes by”, says Jon Pedersen, a demographer at !Mikro in Oslo, who advises international agencies on mortality estimates…(More)”.

The Power of Volunteers: Remote Mapping Gaza and Strategies in Conflict Areas

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Jessica Pechmann: “…In Gaza, increased conflict since October 2023 has caused a prolonged humanitarian crisis. Understanding the impact of the conflict on buildings has been challenging, since pre-existing datasets from artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) models and OSM were not accurate enough to create a full building footprint baseline. The area’s buildings were too dense, and information on the ground was impossible to collect safely. In these hard-to-reach areas, HOT’s remote and crowdsourced mapping methodology was a good fit for collecting detailed information visible on aerial imagery.

In February 2024, after consultation with humanitarian and UN actors working in Gaza, HOT decided to create a pre-conflict dataset of all building footprints in the area in OSM. HOT’s community of OpenStreetMap volunteers did all the data work, coordinating through HOT’s Tasking Manager. The volunteers made meticulous edits to add missing data and to improve existing data. Due to protection and data quality concerns, only expert volunteer teams were assigned to map and validate the area. As in other areas that are hard to reach due to conflict, HOT balanced the data needs with responsible data practices based on the context.

Comparing AI/ML with human-verified OSM building datasets in conflict zones

AI/ML is becoming an increasingly common and quick way to obtain building footprints across large areas. Sources for automated building footprints range from worldwide datasets by Microsoft or Google to smaller-scale open community-managed tools such as HOT’s new application, fAIr.

Now that HOT volunteers have completely updated and validated all OSM buildings in visible imagery pre-conflict, OSM has 18% more individual buildings in the Gaza strip than Microsoft’s ML buildings dataset (estimated 330,079 buildings vs 280,112 buildings). However, in contexts where there has not been a coordinated update effort in OSM, the numbers may differ. For example, in Sudan where there has not been a large organized editing campaign, there are just under 1,500,000 in OSM, compared to over 5,820,000 buildings in Microsoft’s ML data. It is important to note that the ML datasets have not been human-verified and their accuracy is not known. Google Open Buildings has over 26 million building features in Sudan, but on visual inspection, many of these features are noise in the data that the model incorrectly identified as buildings in the uninhabited desert…(More)”.

Kenya’s biggest protest in recent history played out on a walkie-talkie app

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stephanie Wangari: “Betty had never heard of the Zello app until June 18.

But as she participated in Kenya’s “GenZ protests” that month — one of the biggest in the country’s history — the app became her savior.

On Zello, “we were getting updates and also updating others on where the tear-gas canisters were being lobbed and which streets had been cordoned off,” Betty, 27, told Rest of World, requesting to be identified by a pseudonym as she feared backlash from the police. “At one point, I also alerted the group [about] suspected undercover investigative officers who were wearing balaclavas.”

The speed of communicating over Zello made it the primary tool to mobilize crowds and coordinate logistics during the protests. Stephanie Wangari

Nairobi witnessed massive protests in June as thousands of young Kenyans came out on the streets against a proposed bill that would increase taxes on staple foods and other essential goods and services. At least 39 people were killed, 361 were injured, and more than 335 were arrested by the police during the protests, according to human rights groups.

Amid the mayhem, Zello, an app developed by U.S. engineer Alexey Gavrilov in 2007, became the primary tool for protestors to communicate, mobilize crowds, and coordinate logistics. Six protesters told Rest of World that Zello, which allows smartphones to be used as walkie-talkies, helped them find meeting points, evade the police, and alert each other to potential dangers. 

Digital services experts and political analysts said the app helped the protests become one of the most effective in the country’s history.

According to Herman Manyora, a political analyst and lecturer at the University of Nairobi, mobilization had always been the greatest challenge in organizing previous protests in Kenya. The ability to turn their “phones into walkie-talkies” made the difference for protesters, he told Rest of World.

“The government realized that the young people were able to navigate technological challenges. You switch off one app, such as [X], they move to another,” Manyora said.

Zello was downloaded over 40,000 times on the Google Play store in Kenya between June 17 and June 25, according to data from the company. This was “well above our usual numbers,” a company spokesperson told Rest of World. Zello did not respond to additional requests for comment…(More)“

Dada-Disinfo

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Mark Kaigwa et al: “The “Dada Disinfo: Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) Report,” prepared by Nendo and Pollicy, outlines the pervasive issue of TFGBV in Kenya’s vibrant but volatile social media ecosystem. The report draws on extensive research, including social media analytics, surveys, and in-depth interviews with content creators, to shed light on the manifestations, perpetrators, and impacts of TFGBV. The project, supported by USAID and conducted in collaboration with Pollicy, integrates advanced analytics to offer insights and potential solutions to mitigate online gender-based violence in Kenya…(More)”.

Uganda’s Sweeping Surveillance State Is Built on National ID Cards

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Olivia Solon: “Uganda has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decade on biometric tools that document a person’s unique physical characteristics, such as their face, fingerprints and irises, to form the basis of a comprehensive identification system. While the system is central to many of the state’s everyday functions, as Museveni has grown increasingly authoritarian over nearly four decades in power, it has also become a powerful mechanism for surveilling politicians, journalists, human rights advocates and ordinary citizens, according to dozens of interviews and hundreds of pages of documents obtained and analyzed by Bloomberg and nonprofit investigative newsroom Lighthouse Reports.

It’s a cautionary tale for any country considering establishing a biometric identity system without rigorous checks and balances and input from civil society. Dozens of global south countries have adopted this approach as part of an effort to meet sustainable development goals from the UN, which considers having a legal identity to be a fundamental human right. But, despite billions of dollars of investment, with backing from organizations including the World Bank, those identity systems haven’t always lived up to expectations. In many cases, the key problem is the failure to register large swathes of the population, leading to exclusion from public services. But in other places, like Uganda, inclusion in the system has been weaponized for surveillance purposes.

A year-long investigation by Bloomberg and Lighthouse Reports sheds new light on the ways in which Museveni’s regime has built and deployed this system to target opponents and consolidate power. It shows how the underlying software and data sets are easily accessed by individuals at all levels of law enforcement, despite official claims to the contrary. It also highlights, in some cases for the first time, how senior government and law enforcement officials have used these tools to target individuals deemed to pose a political threat…(More)”.

21st Century technology can boost Africa’s contribution to global biodiversity data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Wiida Fourie-Basson: “In spring in the Southern hemisphere, the natural world is on full throttle: “Flowers are blooming, insects are emerging, birds are singing, and reptiles are coming out of their winter hibernation,” wrote Pete Crowcroft, known as @possumpete on the citizen science app, iNaturalist.

Yet, despite this annual bursting forth of life, a 2023 preprint puts the continent’s contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility at a dismal 2.69%, with huge disparities between African countries…

Since its formation in 2008 as part of a graduate project at the University of California, the iNaturalist platform has evolved into one of the world’s most popular biodiversity observation platforms. Anyone, anywhere in the world, with a smartphone can download the app and start posting images and descriptions of their observations, and a large community of identifiers helps to confirm the species’ observation and label it as “research grade”.

Rebelo says iNaturalist is now used on a massive scale: “During the 2023 City Nature Challenge almost 67,000 people made nearly two million observations over four days – that is, five observations each second. Another 22,000 specialists identified 60 thousand species of animals, plants, and fungi. Few citizen science platforms are as powerful and efficient.”..

Andra Waagmeester, data scientist at Micelio in Belgium and a Wikimentor, believes the dearth of biodiversity data from Africa can be solved by combining the iNaturalist and Wikipedia communities: “They are independent communities, but there is substantial overlap between them. By overlaying the two data sets and leveraging the semantic web, we have the means to deal with the challenge.”

The need for biodiversity-related knowledge from Africa was first acknowledged by the Wiki-community during the 2018 Wikimania conference in Cape Town. The Wiki Biodiversity Project has since grown into an active global community that leverages crowd-sourced knowledge from platforms like iNaturalist…(More)”.

Youth Media Literacy Program Fact Checking Manual

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Internews: “As part of the USAID-funded Advancing Rights in Southern Africa Program (ARISA), Internews developed the Youth Media Literacy Program to enhance the digital literacy skills of young people. Drawing from university journalism students, and young leaders from civil society organizations in Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, and South Africa, the program equipped 124 young people to apply critical thinking to online communication and practice improved digital hygiene and digital security practices. The Youth Media Literacy Program Fact Checking Manual was developed to provide additional support and tools to combat misinformation and disinformation and improve online behavior and security…(More)”.