Spaces for Change | S4C participated in the 2025 Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF) held in Lusaka, Zambia, from April 29 to May 1. At the 2025 DRIF, tagged, “Promoting Digital Ubuntu in Approaches to Technology’’, diverse stakeholders from civil society, media, donor agencies, academia, governments and technology companies converged in Lusaka to discuss ways of integrating solidarity and community-centered approaches that reflect the contextual peculiarities of the Global South in new technological developments.
No doubt, the Global South has recorded giant strides in technology over the last decade. To what extent have new technological initiatives recognized and included the participation, needs and priorities of local people, especially marginalized communities and other underserved groups? Over the three days, S4C participated in various sessions where stakeholders deliberated on an array of issues like digital inclusion, decolonization, tech policy development, emerging technologies and human rights. To expand access to home-grown technologies that solve local problems, African countries need to move from being recipients of sophisticated digital tools to becoming developers, producers, and co-creators. This shift is not only necessary to bridge the digital divide between Global South countries and their Global North counterparts, but also requires innovation and strategic collaborations between the public and private sectors.
Access to technology cannot thrive where online civic spaces are not free. Across the continent, restrictions to digital freedoms have been widely reported, mostly taking the form of Internet shutdowns, censorship, social media bans, and the weaponisation of cybersecurity laws to crack down on organized dissent. Despite the many benefits of security technologies, they have made it easier for governments to divert technologies procured to combat terrorism and crime toward surveilling the activities of activists and dissenters. Corroborating S4C’s findings in the Security Playbook of Digital Authoritarianism, several participants shared numerous examples of government-ordered crackdowns on activists in Asia and Africa, deploying surveillance technologies originally procured to combat security threats. These trends provoked conversations around proportionality, necessity, and legality of surveillance in Global South countries.
Noting that national security is the major excuse advanced by governments to justify these restrictions, how then can governments balance national security with human rights protections, ensuring that security objectives do not collide with civic freedoms, especially on digital spaces? Speakers delved deeper into the imperative for rights-based policies that protect citizens against overreaching state conduct. In this regard, civil society organizations (CSOs) and human rights advocates have an important role to play in pushing for rights-respecting policies at the national and regional levels. Civil society must also continue to hold governments accountable for civic space restrictions. To be effective, civil society advocacy for free and open digital spaces must be anchored on evidence and verifiable data.
Stakeholders also discussed the benefits and risks of emerging technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), to the civic tech ecosystem. Among other several recommendations, what stood out is the preference for multi-stakeholder regulatory models for mitigating the risks of modern technologies. DRIF’25 wrapped up with the launch of Paradigm Initiatives’ report highlighting the state of the African digital landscape. The report underscored the importance of collaboration among relevant stakeholders to make digital spaces in the African continent open, inclusive, and free.
