Category Archives: CIPESA Fellows

Astou is a lawyer with undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications from Faculté des Sciences Juridiques et Politiques (FSJP), l’Université Cheik Anta DIOP de Dakar, with extensive experience in business litigation, cybercrime, and cybersecurity.
She will research the role of internet intermediaries and service providers in the fight against Covid-19 in Senegal, including on issues such as facilitating increased access to the internet, privacy and personal data infringements, and content regulation

Thomas Robertson is currently a senior at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, United States pursuing degrees in Diplomacy and World Affairs and Group Language.
He has previously interned with the Africa Regional Media Hub as well as the World Affairs Council of Orange County, and has done work for Trans Lifeline. He joined the CIPESA Fellowship program in January 2020 as part of research on his final year composition paper on digital expression and China-Africa relations.

Tomiwa was a Fellow at CIPESA during his Master’s in Human Rights and Democratisation programme. The fellowship was as a result of the partnership between CIPESA, Makerere University and the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria during which Tomiwa he worked on a couple of projects with CIPESA that focused on internet freedoms and the digital ecosystem in Africa.
Tomiwa has worked with Paradigm Initiative in Nigeria where he provided legal support on the first digital rights legislation in Africa, the Digital Rights and Freedom bill and also worked on several tech policy analysis briefs, strategic advocacy on internet freedoms in Africa. he also had a brief stint with MainOne Cable Company.
He is currently a Doctoral candidate at the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria where he also works as a Researcher at the Democracy, Transparency and Digital Rights Unit of the Centre.

Sotheavin Doch holds a bachelor degree in Environmental Science and a masters degree in Disaster Risk and Resilience. She was a Research Assistant for the BBC Media Action in Cambodia and is a Research and Partnership Officer with Open Development Cambodia (ODC). She supports ODC’s team to promote and teach use of ODC’s site as an open data platform. She organises training for citizens citizen journalists local authorities and others stakeholders to access information of public services’ services/fee digitized on ODC’s website and also conducts training on ‘data-driven journalism’ to journalist students in Cambodia to generate and analyse data into their news reports to develop a new way of telling stories with data or evidence.
Sotheavin joined CIPESA as part of the South South Media Lab (SSMLab) in-residence program which aims at increasing networking and collaboration within the media sector between South-East Asia and East Africa. The residencies took place during November and December 2018.
As part of the fellowship, Sotheavin worked on the use of open data and open source technology to promote public service delivery. She also conducted a training for journalists on data-driven reporting methods, through engagements and needs assessments with ICT4Democarcy Network partners CIPESA, Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) and Transparency International (TI) Uganda.

Wanjiru Mburu is an ICT4D researcher who is passionate about using ICT to bridge the healthcare digital divide in developing countries.
She holds a bachelors degree and masters degree both in Computer Science, and is currently a Ph.D. student at the ICT4D center, University of Cape Town. Her research interests are mainly in human-computer interaction for development (HCI4D) and mobile health fields.
For her fellowship, Wanjiru worked with the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) and African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC), to research how ICT platforms can be used to educate mothers of preterm infants on their health rights in Kenya. A journal article from this fellowship was accepted in the 6th International Conference on Mobile Communication Technology for Development (M4D2018) conference proceedings which was held in Kampala, Uganda in December 2018.