Are sector transgressions by technology firms occurring in all regions of the world, or does these dynamics and effects differ by region? In 2021, the Global Data Justice project partnered with Data4Change and a team of researchers to explore sector transgressions during the COVID-19 pandemic in East Africa. This online series includes excerpts from case studies of Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, as well as a synthesis report (featured below).
Data4Change is a UK-based non-profit working to hold power to account with data. The East Africa project was supported with funding from Omidyar Network.
Introduction
On the 11th of March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic of SARS-COV-2, also known as COVID-19. Implementation of safety measures ensued, such as the imposition of lockdowns and curfews and the adoption of social distancing. These measures impacted several sectors including transport, tourism, education, health, and culture. From the outset, digital technologies—namely contact tracing apps, vaccination passports, and digital health checks—played a crucial role in pandemic management and control. However, this rapid uptake of data technologies, especially in previously untouched sectors, worried academics and civil society organizations. There were concerns about data privacy breaches, potentialities of data leakage, and possibilities for function creep that would continue well after the pandemic is over.
Data justice scholarship builds upon these concerns by understanding some of the developments as examples of ‘sector transgressions’. This notion describes how dominant technology corporations use their computational infrastructure as an entry point into other autonomous sectors. This is of concern not only because it leads to the crowding out of technical and ethical sectoral expertise in favor of data-driven approaches, but it also accumulates decision-making capabilities in the hands of commercial tech actors that are unelected and (usually) unaccountable to the public, in case of wrongdoing. Tamar Sharon (2020) focuses on the health sphere as an example of a sector that has experienced considerable transgressions during the pandemic.
It is important to note that variations of sector transgressions are not a new phenomenon, as they are common in low and middle-income countries. They can take the shape of public-private partnerships, the allocation of funding and equipment to key public sectors, and the initiation of philanthropic pilot projects for the purpose of economic development. To exemplify this point, I present FarmBeats, an Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure by Microsoft that uses sensors, drones, satellites, and cloud-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help Kenyan farmers. As part of Microsoft’s corporate responsibility initiative, the product is presented as being aligned with the UN’s sustainability goals. Microsoft is testing this data-driven digital infrastructure in the agricultural sector of developing countries.
Another example is the involvement of powerful tech actors in the education sector, as illustrated by the Bridge International Academies and SocialEDU projects. Bridge International Academies is presented as a for-profit chain of low-cost primary schools, located in the slums of Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, and Uganda using standardized, scripted, datafied, and automated methods of education. Bridge International Academies benefitted from investments from the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as from the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development (DFID). SocialEDU was promoted as a mobile app, integrated with Facebook features, providing free, high-quality, localized educational content on handheld devices. Here, we see digitization of the education sectors, punctuated by either direct or indirect involvement of big data players.
Finally, it must be noted that these partnerships often occur with the help of development agencies from the global core. For instance, USAID and Google have partnered to create mapping software that locates green pastures for pastoralists in Tanzania and Ethiopia. We have also seen a partnership emerge between the two actors during the Ebola epidemic, where Google and USAID worked with the Liberian government to invest in a fiber network, built by Google. This project operated under the justification that stronger connectivity would help detect and surveil the spread of the disease, and facilitate access to mobile health and telemedicine, all while making the Liberian economy stronger.
Notably, most of these examples of sector transgressions predate the pandemic in African countries. As data justice scholarship warns about the potential dependencies created from these pandemic-related sphere transgressions, we turn to East Africa—where digital innovation is rampant—to focus on stories examining the intersection between technology and governance, during an ongoing global pandemic.
From fourth world to digital revolution
In the wake of the new millennium and the rise of a new economy, the sociologist Manuel Castell drew attention to those excluded from the networked society, which he grouped under the term the Fourth World. He spoke of a black hole of informational capitalism, to describe a spatial logic of exclusion, which defined certain areas as non-valuable to the information economy. Consequently, these regions were “by-passed by wealth and infrastructure that allow us to produce, consume, and live in today’s world” (Castells, 1997). In his book, Castell categorized Africa as living in technological apartheid. Contemporary assessments of Africa’s position in global digital capitalism either framed regions of the continent, such as Kolwezi in DRC, as the supplier of Cobalt essential for the fabrication of electronic consumers’ batteries, or constructed African spaces, such as Agbogloshie in Ghana, as sites for technological waste disposal (Oyedemi, 2019).
However, a decade ago, we saw a shift in the discourse around the role and position of African countries in the networked society. Recent years have witnessed an increase in broadband access and a rise in mobile phone usage, turning African regions into burgeoning digital markets. This narrative is constructed by news media articles and development agencies lauding a modernist discourse of an African Digital Renaissance. This discourse is best described by an embrace of the 4IR (Fourth Industrial Revolution) principles, a term popularized by an Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. For instance, in 2016 the Guardian ran several articles under the title of “The Tech Continent: Africa’s Digital Renaissance,” sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. These news stories focused on the positive effect of digital technologies on African economic and social development. Rice-Oxley (2016) writes about the e-reader and digital books in rural Rwanda. Shearlaw (2016) compiles stories of how the internet is changing the everyday lives of Africans. Mutiga and Flood (2016) elaborate on the democratizing effect of mobile phones in Africa and the possibility for the continent to leapfrog other regions. The momentum of this narrative is still in motion. For instance, Brookings listed the benefits of embracing the 4IR for the African continent, including providing financial inclusion to those previously excluded from formal financial systems, re-inventing labor for the projected large African workforce, and modernizing key sectors such as the agricultural and health sectors in an effort to curb the effects of climate change and to provide better disease responses (Ndung’u & Signé, 2020). Some African leaders also adopted this narrative in their national strategies. For example, the 2020 Kenyan Digital Economy Strategy states that it is “geared towards ensuring that Kenya leads the region towards the 4IR.” Similarly, Ethiopia’s 2020 Digital Strategy stipulates that “the world is undergoing a fourth industrial revolution. Ethiopia must proactively embrace it” (Ethiopia Digital Strategy, 2020)
Critics of the tech-evangelist discourse point out that it tends to brush aside crucial considerations about the ethics of data use, data privacy, and the unintended consequences of new technologies such as AI (Birhane, 2020). In a bid to portray the nation as heading toward a competitive position within the global knowledge economy, these policy documents rarely, if ever, mention the drawbacks of increased digitization (Friederici et al., 2017). Perhaps the African continent is moving beyond technological apartheid toward a Fourth Industrial Revolution. But on which terms? And who is leading this revolution?
Then the pandemic happened…
The pillars of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, such as big data analytics, location detection technologies, and live data visualization were consolidated as elements to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, both globally and nationally. Moreover, tech leaders used the implementation of social distancing measures to strengthen their infrastructural expansion. For instance, waivers were given for pandemic-related technology use. On March 23, 2020, the Kenyan President approved the rolling of Loon, a sister company of Google, as one of the first emergency responses to the virus spread. In a presidential press release, the Kenyan president addressed citizens to inform them about the commercial rolling of the 4G stratospheric internet infrastructure, with the promise of delivering universal connectivity across the country. This crisis management response was meant to facilitate work and education remotely. Unsurprisingly, this launch was also framed in 4IR language, as the public communication stated that this launch was a step that would allow Kenya to “retain her competitive advantages in ICT and innovation amid the COVID-19 crisis”. The announcement of universal 4G coverage was not welcomed by all. Some Kenyans took to Twitter with the hashtag #WaterAndFoodFirst and asked for the prioritization of water and food as opposed to commercial and innovative infrastructures of connectivity, which were not perceived as priorities. This situation opened the door for citizens to voice their discontent toward the neoliberal regime that privatized water making it hard to follow basic steps for disease prevention, such as washing hands, then turned to technology as an experimental and improvisational solution to crisis mitigation (Kimari, 2020). The sphere transgression framework points out the risks associated with the illegitimate access of tech corporations to previously autonomous spheres (Sharon, 2020). By focusing on the East African region, I aim to expand on this framework to account for actors that remained underexplored, namely international aid agencies and monopolistic telecommunication companies (as opposed to big tech).
Humanitarian and aid agencies
On May 14, 2020, Jon Snow, Inc., a USAID-backed NGO health system consultancy firm, posted a document explaining how it is leading Ethiopia’s digital health response. The digital responses were categorized in 3 ways: (1) monitoring critical item availability, like the availability of quality hand sanitizers, (2) surveilling and tracking the health checks of travelers entering Ethiopia, COVID cases, and the follow-up house-to-house screening of (mostly) health workers, and (3) providing health education through a WhatsApp helpline that allows users to access the correct information and self-report. Jon Snow, Inc. works with Data Use Partnership (DUP), a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. What’s interesting in this case is that partnerships between the health system firm, the DUP, and the Ethiopian health authorities were brokered through an international aid agency, i.e. USAID. According to Kinfe Yilme (2022), this marks a continuation of the long-standing relationship between international partners and the national health sector. He points out that this partnership occurred outside the public-private partnership legal and regulatory regime.
Previous critical research on the impact of aid on African countries frames humanitarianism as a neocolonial practice supporting unpopular policies and perpetuating social inequalities. This body of scholarship interrogates the usefulness of humanitarian interventions, which are seen as reducing the efficiency of state institutions, reinforcing underdevelopment, cementing one-party undemocratic regimes, and undermining democracy, all while still being portrayed as altruistic (Buba, 2018). The parameters of this debate were further complicated by the introduction of digital humanitarianism and the reliance on big data for humanitarian interventions. One could say that at best these digitally-driven humanitarian initiatives demonstrate, at times, a simplistic techno-solutionism approach to structural social and economic problems (Morozov, 2013). At worst, they frame vulnerable communities in developing countries as an acceptable terrain for experimentation, which further exposes them to harm and risk of data misuse in the absence of protective legislation (Fejerskov, 2017; Duffield, 2016; Sandvik et al; 2017; Taylor, 2015; Taylor & Broeders, 2015; Madianou, 2019).
The Digital Health Activity health supply management project started in 2015; therefore it predates the COVID-19 pandemic. It was launched as a means to “build sustainable, resilient, and interoperable health information systems (HIS) that ensure the entire health sector has the data, analytics, and skills necessary to improve the health and well-being of all Ethiopians” (JSI, 2021) and it is governed by a consortium of companies ranging from healthcare NGOs to biometric tech firms. It is supported by the Ethiopian government as a way to achieve the “Information Revolution Roadmap”. That is to say that when Jon Snow, Inc. announced its involvement in the Ethiopian COVID national response, it tapped into an already existing infrastructure and a cemented narrative, therefore boosting its legitimacy. Sphere transgression conceives of the illegitimate entry of tech actors, in spheres of politics and health, as problematic because it creates “new dependencies on corporate actors for the delivery of public goods” by non-elected/non-accountable actors. In this particular case, we see that this entry into the sphere of health was facilitated and legitimized, not by the dominant position of Jon Snow, Inc. in the digital industry, but rather by the intervention of USAID and the justifications for development.
Monopolistic telecom companies
The sphere transgression framework focuses mostly on the encroachment of tech companies, such as Google and Apple, on autonomous sectors (Sharon, 2020). It is important to note that while Google and Apple are dominant players in the tech industry, at times they are in competition or even outmatched by telecommunication companies or legacy media organizations (Poell et al., 2022). In the East African context, we see the strong emergence of the monopolistic telecom company as a key player in pandemic responses. For instance, Safaricom consolidated its grip over the Kenyan entertainment industry, while EthioTelecom started providing digital financial services. Despite key differences in their governance, i.e. Safaricom’s dominance is traced back to the structural adjustment imposed by the World Bank in the 1990s while EthioTelecom’s dominance is explained by its status as the state’s telecom company in a recently liberalized industry; both companies ventured into new sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Safaricom is Kenya’s largest mobile network operator, and one of the most profitable companies in East Africa. In 2007, Safaricom began to expand into finance with the introduction of M-Pesa, an SMS-based mobile banking service. Soon after, M-Pesa became deeply integrated into Kenyan life and was used as a successful example of leapfrogging. On the one hand, the service was praised for its financial inclusion capacities and as playing “a significant role in lifting many families out of poverty” and launching “ordinary Africans, many still without bank accounts, into the digital economy” (Srinivasan, 2019, p. 214). These successes are seen as possible due to the high connectivity, the weak banking system, and the characteristics of the informal Kenyan economy (Srinivasan, 2019). On the other hand, commentators scrutinized these success stories as obstructing the entanglement of the M-Pesa service with powerful actors from the Global North and invisibilizing the essential informal vendors, who rarely receive celebratory attention (Ouma et al., 2019). With 43% of the country’s GDP passing through M-Pesa and 25.5 million users, M-Pesa “rapidly acquired the status of a fundamental infrastructure for the majority of Kenyan adults, serving as a de facto national banking system” (Edwards, 2021). Consequently, the service also solidified the dominant position of Safaricom. According to Mutung’u, the COVID-19 pandemic created new business lines for the telecommunication company. Safaricom, which already dominates the mobile communication, internet services, and mobile payment markets, extended its grip on the entertainment domain. The company launched the video-on-demand service named BAZE (Mutung’u, forthcoming).
Because of social distancing requirements, the livelihood of artists, who depended on live performance, were affected by the pandemic. BAZE emerged as Safaricom’s response to this issue. The company marketed the new product as part of its social responsibility (Mutung’u, forthcoming). What makes BAZE an articulation of a sector transition is its use of the network effects leveraged from Safaricom, as they enter the sector of entertainment. As an internet service provider, Safaricom launched a BAZE data package allowing consumers to browse the content of Baze at a discount rate. (Mutung’u, forthcoming). It could be said that, here, the operator used the opportunity afforded by the pandemic to launch subsidized bundles, privileging access to only some parts of the internet and raising network neutrality concerns (Willems, 2016).
Similarly, in Ethiopia, a monopolistic telecommunication company used its scale and essentiality for users to propel itself into another sector. With 53 million mobile subscribers, EthioTelecom covers 80% of Ethiopia. The state company used its customer base to aggressively market Telebirr, its new mobile banking platform. Telebirr was justified by the pandemic social distancing requirements and supplemented by the tenets of the African financial inclusion discourse. In only two months, Telebirr gained over 6 million subscribers. While the telecommunication sector has recently been liberalized, allowing new operators to join the market in the following years, the right to engage in digital financial services is exclusively granted to the state’s enterprise (Yilma, forthcoming). The framework of sector transgression scrutinizes the activities of big tech as creating new dependencies and concentrating decision-making powers in the hands of a few corporate actors. While it is true that these cases do not represent sector transgression into public spheres, these practices show that Safaricom and EthioTelecom are using their influential position as market leaders to carve out for themselves a new position as infrastructures for digital media distribution and digital finance operations, respectively. This is not a new phenomenon. The practice of vertical integration has been scrutinized in big tech companies (Srnicek, 2016). What we see here is another highly datafied sector replicating this practice.
The implications of stories from East Africa
These cases examine the intersection of technology and governance in the East African tech sector amidst a global pandemic. The focus has been on two elements that remain underexplored in the sector transgression framework, namely the central position of monopolistic telcos pushing for COVID-friendly cross-sectoral products and the key role played by international aid agencies in legitimizing the transgressions. For one, USAID has been studied as pushing market-based solutions (Berndt, 2015) and as encouraging low-to-middle income countries to record data on their citizens, prior to the global pandemic (Taylor & Broeders, 2016). Moreover, the role of development agencies, operating under the justification of economic growth, complicates the discussion and invites new analytical complexities to the debate of what an inclusive global data justice framework could be.
As articulated by data justice scholarship, we need to move beyond privacy concerns (Sharon, 2020; López et al., 2022) and analyze these emerging partnerships as consolidating infrastructural monopolies. Who has control over these monopolies is a question that has a detrimental impact on human rights, especially in regions that are politically and/or economically unstable (Iyer et al., 2021). For instance, prior to the pandemic, a collaboration between Safaricom and Huawei led to the rolling out of 2000 CCTV surveillance cameras in Kenya’s major cities. After the pandemic hit, the security officials enforced a strict curfew and the security cameras were used as tools to observe curfew-breakers. The surveillance footage from the CCTV cameras showcased people on the streets after curfew. This led to the enforcement of a barricade on major roads, in order to prevent citizens’ movement. However, while the CCTV cameras showed visual data on who is on the streets, they did not convey the legitimate reasons to be out during curfew hours, such as needing to urgently move in the city as a doctor or a patient (Mutung’u, 2022).
More importantly, these articulations of sector transgression in East Africa occurred in an environment of regulatory apathy and within a legislative vacuum, obscured by the celebratory narrative of African digital inclusion. This creates a fertile terrain for data extractivism (Iyer et al., 2021). For instance, the Data Protection Act of Kenya does not cover data analysis for the purpose of marketing and enhancing product functionalities (Mutung’u, forthcoming). Similarly, Ethiopia has no data privacy legislation to regulate the collection, processing, retention, and sharing of personal data. Moreover, the reliance on the tech responses pushed by international development partners happened outside of the private-public partnership regulatory regime. The tech solutions were embraced by the health authorities without attending to human rights concerns and little attention has been paid to this topic from regulators, national human rights institutions, or civil society organizations (Yilma, forthcoming). This lack of attention is concerning as we consider that we are undergoing a datafication turn. Often compared to oil, data is said to be treated as a natural resource to be mined and extracted from individuals—without consent or compensation—then analyzed and refined for-profit (Birhane, 2020; Sadowski, 2019; Couldry & Mejias, 2019). When we factor in the global asymmetries in this equation, we see that a small group of countries have the resources and capital to experiment and design digital technology. Not only that, they also have the capacity to aggressively expand to new markets and lock in the next billion users. While low-income and middle-income countries head toward technological dependence, they become an easy terrain to be dominated by the USA or/and China (while Europe fails to keep up) (Pinto, 2016). Beyond the rhetoric of the African Digital Revolution, it could also be said that Africa also represents an untapped source of data disputed by both American and Chinese big tech companies. All of this occurs against the backdrop of a weak legislative framework and a lack of competition (Iyer et al., 2021). In times of global crisis when civil rights are put on hold, it is important to move beyond the praise of the flourishing tech-start-up sectors of the Sheba Valley and Silicon Savannah toward critically examining the long-term implications.
