Abstract:
The Digital New Deal for Africa (DND4A) project began in 2020 as the second phase of the IDRC cyber policy Think Tank Initiative, which was called the Africa Digital Policy Project (ADDP). The term 'digital new deal' refers to experimental policy interventions in the globalised processes of digitalisation and datafication required to redress the currently uneven distribution of opportunities and harms arising from these processes. The various research areas in this programme are conceptually united by trying to understand and address the governance challenges arising from the nature of digitalisation and datafication as global public goods. The project developed a ‘rights and risks’ framework to systematically analyse the governance challenges arising from these two processes on the African continent. This framing acknowledges the uneven impact of known harms and the need to mitigate risks differently in rapidly digitalising developing economies and societies.
