Skip to content

Who Holds Africa’s Data?

25 September 2026

In October 2021, Kenya’s High Court ruled that the government had acted unlawfully in rolling out Huduma Namba, its flagship digital identity programme. The state had collected personal and biometric data from millions of citizens without first conducting a data protection impact assessment, as the Data Protection Act of 2019 required. The court barred further implementation until that assessment was done. Two years later, when the government launched a successor system, Maisha Namba, it faced

Read More »

The Quiet Engine of African Innovation

In April 2020, Togo had no functioning social registry and a population suddenly cut off from daily income by pandemic restrictions. Within weeks, the government launched Novissi, a cash transfer programme delivered entirely by mobile money. Eligibility was first determined using the voter register, which covered most adults. Later, working with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the nonprofit GiveDirectly, Togo used satellite imagery and mobile phone data to target the poorest areas. Recipients enrolled by dialling a short code. No offices, no paper, no queues. Novissi is usually told as a story about crisis response. It is better

Read More »

Africa’s Founders Are Building on Public Rails

When Stripe bought Nigeria’s Paystack in 2020 for a reported $200 million, the headlines focused on the founders and their investors. Less attention went to the infrastructure underneath. Paystack’s product worked because Nigeria already had a national instant payment switch, run by the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, that could move money between any two bank accounts in seconds. The startup did not build those rails. It built a better way for merchants to use them. That pattern now defines much of African entrepreneurship. Across the continent, the most successful young companies sit on top of digital public infrastructure, the shared systems

Read More »