🌍 AI language models train on skewed data. Their output shapes human speech.
When AI-generated conversations become our primary input, what happens to human creativity and critical thinking?
🌐 Where is #PlatformGovernance actually heading?
Bulanda shares a reflection on a growing shift across regions: from high-level commitments to more grounded, contested, and context-specific approaches to governing digital platforms.
🔗 Read the full piece: digitalaction.co/from-princip...
Bulanda will be also moderating a conversation on Thursday 16th April, bringing together regulators, civil society, and tech developers for a crucial roundtable conversation: "Digital Sovereignty and Inclusive DPI in Africa."
Find the whole agenda and learn more here: drif.paradigmhq.org/agenda/
Digital Action will be present at hashtag#DRIF26!
On Wednesday 15th Bulanda T Nkhowani will be speaking a session organized by TechSocietal: "We Found No Violation”: How Platform Moderation Systems Fail African Contexts.
You can also watch/rewatch the webinar recording here if you’d like to catch up or revisit the conversation 🎥 youtu.be/rjRgrhFDQ3A
🌱 What does Digital Public Infrastructure look like through an Afro-feminist lens?
This new report explores how DPI shapes gender and digital rights across Uganda, South Africa, and Kenya, and why inclusion must go beyond design to address structural barriers.
📄 aira.africa/new-report-a...
🌍 As AI data centers expand across the Gulf and Egypt, we're seeing long-term costs being overlooked.
Water use, energy demand and environmental strain are infrastructures that don’t exist in isolation. As we have also seen in #LatAm, they reshape local realities.
edition.cnn.com/2026/03/30/c...
🗣️ When narrative becomes survival, digital spaces become battlegrounds.
This year’s Palestine Digital Activism Forum [March 30th] explores how stories are produced, amplified, and controlled—and what that means for those on the ground.
Learn more:
🌍 The Global Center on #AI Governance, together w/the Centre for Human Rights - University of Pretoria & Luminate, will launch the report: 'Advancing Tech Justice in Africa: Governance, Accountability and Rights in the Digital Era.' on March 30th.
Learn more: www.globalcenter.ai/news/report-...
🌍 #PlatformGovernance is shifting: From principles to practice. Across regions, the question is no longer what should happen, but how.
This piece by our Africa RD, Bulanda Tapiwa Nkhowani, traces where governance is heading and what may still be missing.
digitalaction.co/from-princip...
Interested in pushing for #TechJustice?
📣 We're looking for our next #SWANA regional director!
We are seeking a passionate professional to lead on the work of Digital Action in the region.
The deadline is tight (March 22nd), so if you haven't apply today!
👉🏾 digitalaction.co/join-our-team/
📣 #Today! (March 5 ) - 11am GMT-3 a key debate goes live:
“Social media bans for under-16s — yes or no? Perspectives from #LatinAmerica.”
Organized by Observacom, accessible on their YouTube channel
🛰️ Orbital data centres are being pitched as the future: efficient and environmentally friendly. For much of the Global Majority, however, this is yet another question of limited ownership.
If data centres move to space, who has leverage?
Read D. Dosunmu's piece:
📣 We're looking for our next #SWANA regional director!
We are seeking a passionate professional to lead on the work of Digital Action in the region and to play a key role in ensuring its contributions to the Tech Justice and Policy ecosystem.
Apply today 👉🏾 digitalaction.co/join-our-team/
🌍 A new UNDP–Morocco facility aims to accelerate digital transformation across Arab States and lead "South-South cooperation for digital transformation".
☁️ “Digital sovereignty” often sounds abstract. But when your data is stored, governed, and monetized elsewhere, it becomes tangible. Reem Almasri's deep dive unpacks what sovereignty really means and gets us thinking on the urgency for independence from Big Tech: 🔗
📣 #Tomorrow! Don't miss the discussion on #DataCenters in #MENA: The Politics of Digital Infrastructure?
If any of these issues resonate and you’d like to think together, don’t hesitate to reach out. These conversations grow through exchange.
✨ This week we wrapped up sharing what we learned during our #ExplorationDays: ideas and questions we’ll keep carrying forward.
We shared a few threads with questions and also references and readings regarding #MovementBuilding #CommunityTech #DigitalSoverignty #AIRegulation and #NarrativeChange.
SMEX and the Arab Reform Initiative invite to the online event next Feb 24th:
Data Centers in MENA: The Politics of Digital Infrastructure?
A critical conversation on digital sovereignty and the future of tech governance in SWANA.
Register here: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
📚 Digital Sovereignty: A Descriptive Analysis and a Critical Evaluation of Existing Models offered a critical lens.
By comparing models and assumptions, it helps clarify what sovereignty can—and cannot—mean in practice.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
🌍 Burcu Kilic and Renata Avila’s work on Tech for the Global Majority sharpened our thinking.
Digital sovereignty doesn’t happen by accident. It requires strategy, coordination, and power-building rooted in local realities.
progressive.international/wire/2025-03...
📘 AI Now’s research on Public Digital Infrastructure grounded this exploration.
Moving from hype to public value means building infrastructures that serve collective needs, not extractive models. A key reference for thinking sovereignty beyond buzzwords.
ainowinstitute.org/publications...
🌳One image helped us think this through: an olive tree.
Values are the trunk. From there, branches and fruit can grow freely. We want tools rooted in values, not profit—digital worlds we can describe using our own references.
Sovereignty you can touch.
🌱 We saw this clearly in grassroots digital cooperatives. When tools come from Big Tech (or new global giants) dependency grows fast. When communities design their own tools, sovereignty takes root in ways that actually make sense locally.
✋ During our #ExplorationDays, sovereignty stopped being abstract.
We kept coming back to agency: the ability to decide and to act. Sovereignty becomes real when agency is tangible, when it shapes our daily digital and physical lives.
And Ford Foundation’s Chancellar Williams’ reflections on Tribal Digital Sovereignty.
These offer concrete paths toward people-centred tech futures.
www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-sto...
📚 To explore further:
Promising Trouble’s The case for community tech:
www.promisingtrouble.net/blog/blog-po...
✨ What makes this approach powerful is agency.
Meaningful innovation happens when technology serves people, not the other way around—and when communities can shape, govern, and sustain what they build.
