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22May

Zimbabwe’s National AI Strategy: Policy Lessons for Africa

Author CIPESA Posted on

By Edrine Wanyama |

Zimbabwe recently adopted its National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy 2026–2030 (AI strategy)  to guide digital technology and transformation in the country. The strategy aims to accelerate development, enhance industrialisation, and improve service delivery in sectors such as health, finance, agriculture, education and public administration. The strategy emphasises building local data infrastructure as opposed to relying on foreign data storage infrastructure while promoting an AI governance approach grounded in Ubuntu, human rights, accountability, transparency and inclusivity.

However, an important question is whether Zimbabwe’s approach offers useful lessons for other African countries developing national AI strategies.

Lessons for Other African Countries

The country’s AI strategy is organised around six pillars that together map a practical path for AI adoption and deployment. First, AI talent and capacity development is essential for ensuring that institutions have the skills needed to implement AI effectively. Second, AI infrastructure and computational sovereignty are necessary for ensuring digital and data sovereignty. Third, AI adoption and service transformation are critical for supporting the integration of AI across public and private sectors to improve their productivity, accountability and transparency.

The fourth pillar, AI governance, ethics and regulation, is essential for building public trust and creating a framework that supports responsible innovation. The fifth pillar, AI research, development, and innovation, can drive investments, expand knowledge production and strengthen academic output. The sixth pillar, strategic international collaboration, presents an opportunity for global partnerships with key players and stakeholders, technology exchange, and potentially greater investment.  

Consequently, these pillars offer useful lessons for other countries seeking to harness AI for socio-economic transformation while protecting data rights and data sovereignty.

Alignment with the African Union (AU) AI Strategy

Zimbabwe’s AI Strategy reflects several priorities contained in the AU Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy, particularly the emphasis on coordinated AI governance, digital sovereignty, and sectoral innovation. Zimbabwe’s strategy aims to harmonise the deployment and use of AI across sectors such as health, finance, agriculture, education and public administration through common governance benchmarks for AI governance. If implemented effectively, these goals could help to address digital neo-colonialism, an issue that has been dominant in Africa’s technological space.

The Strategy also places strong emphasis on AI as a tool for socio-economic development, aligning with Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in sectors such as health, agriculture, and education. The Strategy promotes the deployment of AI to improve agriculture through crop disease prevention, as well as mining and mineral development, which is consistent with the AU AI strategy’s priorities on resource optimisation and climate resilience.

However, Zimbabwe faces significant governance and implementation challenges. The country scored 0 in the 2024 Global Index on Responsible AI Governance, highlighting the gap between policy ambition and institutional readiness. This means it requires major actions to implement the strategy, such as the establishment of robust legal safeguards, accountability mechanisms, oversight institutions, and rights-based governance frameworks, which are also emphasised within the AU strategy.  Other African countries can draw lessons from Zimbabwe’s approach, such as the need to complement AI strategies with stronger governance capacity, clearer regulatory safeguards, and more coherent data governance frameworks to support responsible and accountable AI deployment.

UNESCO Guidance on AI

The UNESCO Recommendations on Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, adopted in 2021, is a global normative framework that promotes human rights, including human dignity, transparency, fairness, human oversight in AI systems, and democratic participation. It also provides practical policy action areas covering issues such as data governance, gender, education and research, health, and social wellbeing.

While the UNESCO Guidance is emphatic on ethical and privacy considerations, Zimbabwe’s strategy falls short. Ambitions to integrate AI into public service delivery sectors such as education, health, and public administration will require stronger safeguards to ensure alignment with the human-centric principles articulated in the UNESCO framework. In the age of AI, data security concerns, intellectual property rights, algorithmic bias, and institutional accountability are central to responsible deployment of AI and require clearer policy and regulatory attention.

Similarly, the UNESCO Guidance warns against the use of AI in a manner that undermines democratic participation, civic engagement, and collective decision-making. This is especially important in contexts where surveillance technologies such as facial recognition, drone monitoring, communication tracking, and social media surveillance are deployed without clear safeguards or independent oversight. Zimbabwe, like several other African countries, has invested in AI-enabled infrastructures, such as the “smart city” systems to monitor and surveil citizens in ways that are opaque and lack clear accountability mechanisms.

As African countries continue developing national AI strategies and governance frameworks, they must strive to ensure that the deployment of AI is transparent, publicly accountable, and pays close attention to ethical and human rights standards. Without these safeguards, AI risks reinforcing exclusion, surveillance, and digital authoritarianism rather than advancing development.

Conclusion

Zimbabwe’s adoption of an AI Strategy is an important step toward advancing tech-enabled digital and socio-economic transformation. It also reflects the country’s intent to align national priorities with the African Union’s vision for AI-driven development across the entire continent. However, for such strategies to be effective and legitimate, they must be grounded in ethical and human rights standards laid down in regional and international benchmarks.

14May

Rethinking Platform Design and Accountability to Combat TFGBV in Africa

Author CIPESA Posted on

By Alice Aparo |

Africa’s rapid digitalisation, spanning e-commerce, online services, and digital infrastructure, has been accompanied by a persistent rise of Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV). African women and girls are exposed to several forms of TFGBV, including online harassment, algorithmic discrimination, and deepfakes that prevent equal participation in online spaces.

To commemorate this year’s International Women’s Day, the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) convened a webinar themed Advancing platform accountability for women’s online safety in Africa to discuss efforts to enhance women’s online safety and hold digital platforms accountable.

A key insight from the discussion was that the rise of TFGBV in Africa is amplified by platform design, limited legal enforcement, weak moderation of content by digital platforms, and a poor system for reporting abuse and harmful content. The low levels of digital literacy, poor redress and appeals mechanisms, and lack of awareness among policymakers were also cited. Many of those who experience online abuse struggle to obtain justice and, in most cases, turn to self-censorship instead. This ultimately shrinks women’s voices in public discourse.

Further, online harm is often misframed as an individual responsibility, whereas it is largely enabled by platform design features such as anonymity and algorithm-driven content amplification that support harmful behaviour and accelerate the spread of harmful content. In her remarks, Barbra Okafor, founder and Lead Strategist at The Agency Lab, said major digital platforms prioritise “profit and scale over user safety”, adding that features like reposting and seamless sharing are built for viral amplification, not user protection.

Okafor added that when content that qualifies as harassment is posted, algorithms interpret the resulting engagement as “interest” and accelerate the distribution of the abuse rather than introducing safeguards. She described these platforms as “mini-gods” that have assumed regulatory power without corresponding accountability, making online user safety secondary to profit.

Gaps in content moderation, the limited inclusion of African linguistic expertise, and weaknesses in platform design and legal frameworks raise serious concerns about technology companies’ capacity to respond to harmful content in a timely and context-sensitive manner.

The increasing reliance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for content moderation, yet it is largely trained on Western datasets, means it continues to struggle to detect harassment expressed in African languages or to interpret culturally specific slurs. This leaves women participating in public discourse exposed to unchecked, gendered insults and coordinated digital attacks.  

While AI-based features such as deepfake detection, content filters, and automated tools such as Safety Mode and Limits exist, their effectiveness is uneven across African contexts. These measures are further constrained by structural challenges, including limited investment in local content moderation and weak legal enforcement systems.

Marie-Simone Kadurira, an independent feminist researcher and panelist, noted that digital violence often mirrors and amplifies offline abuse, reinforcing patriarchal norms through technology. This perpetuates existing gender power imbalances and harmful social norms. She added that African women, particularly those in public-facing roles such as journalism, activism, or politics, face heightened, systemic harassment.

Despite the existence of cybersecurity and data protection laws in many African countries supported by regional instruments such as the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) Resolutions on developing Guidelines to assist States monitor technology companies in respect of their duty to maintain information integrity through independent fact-checking (ACHPR/Res. 630 (LXXXII) 2025) and the Resolution on the protection of women against digital violence in Africa (ACHPR/Res. 522 (LXXII) 2022) – addressing TFGBV remains a persistent problem across the continent. The two resolutions emphasise the obligation of African states to protect individuals, particularly women and girls, from digital harms, including online harassment, cyberstalking, non-consensual sharing of intimate images, and other forms of abuse.

Dr. Abudu Sallam Waiswa, Head Litigation, Prosecution and Legal Advisory at the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), said effective legal enforcement remains challenging because most major platforms, such as Meta, Google, and X, are neither based nor registered on the African continent. This creates significant jurisdictional gaps that hinder thorough investigations and accountability.

Several recommendations emerged at the discussion:

  1. Platforms must hire and train African local content moderators with linguistic and cultural expertise across African contexts.
  2. Governments must shift from reactive legislation to forward-looking, preventive frameworks. This includes mandating that platforms provide transparency on their algorithmic moderation and establishing a local physical presence to facilitate legal accountability.
  3. Civil society and policymakers need to deepen their understanding of how algorithmic systems work in order to effectively monitor and govern them.
  4. Fund women’s rights organisations to continue to provide survivor support, document abuse, advocate for policy reform, and hold both governments and tech companies accountable in the fight against TFGBV.
  5. Strengthen the ability of users to recognise, respond to, and recover from online harm.
11May

CIPESA Urges Rights-Centred Approach to Uganda’s AI Strategy

Author CIPESA Posted on

By CIPESA Writer |

The Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) has submitted recommendations to Uganda’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Emerging Technologies Strategy national taskforce, calling for a human rights-centred approach to the governance of these technologies.

The submission, made in response to the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance’s ongoing process to develop a National AI and Emerging Technologies Strategy, welcomes Uganda’s ambition to harness AI for development. At the same time, CIPESA cautions that innovation must be matched with the legal, institutional, and ethical safeguards needed to protect people from harms.

Discussions on Uganda’s AI policy come at a moment when AI technologies are already being deployed in both public and private sectors. The submission states that AI-enhanced tools are currently employed in customs risk profiling at the Uganda Revenue Authority, customer service functions, digital financial services, research organisations, and environmental monitoring initiatives.

In agriculture, AI-powered tools can support weather forecasting, pest detection, control and prevention, and tailored advice for farmers, whereas in healthcare, they can enhance disease detection, diagnostics, prescription and help address shortages in medical personnel. These applications highlight the transformative potential of AI, yet there are also concerns around surveillance, exclusion, discrimination, and misuse of personal data.

The submission is informed by CIPESA’s broader work on digital rights in Africa, including the Navigating the Implications of AI on Digital Democracy in Uganda report, which emphasises the growing impact of AI-driven technologies on online expression, political communication, surveillance practices, and civic participation.

The recommendations also build on CIPESA’s earlier work on developing an inclusive AI ecosystem for Uganda. According to the policy brief, An Artificial Intelligence Eco-System for Uganda, the country’s existing legal and policy frameworks provide a fragmented foundation for regulating AI and responding to emerging risks such as algorithmic bias, automated discrimination, opaque decision-making, and AI-enabled surveillance.

Accordingly, CIPESA calls for a rights-by-design approach to AI governance. High-risk AI systems used by both public and private actors should be transparent, auditable, and subject to independent oversight. It also calls for mandatory Human Rights Impact Assessments for AI systems used in sensitive sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, education, taxation, law enforcement, and social protection.

The submission further recommends dedicated legal and policy measures that address algorithmic transparency, automated decision-making, public-sector AI procurement, safeguards against discriminatory outcomes, and mechanisms for redress where harm occurs.

CIPESA also raises concerns about the growing use of automated systems in areas such as digital lending and mobile money services, where millions of Ugandans are already subjected to algorithmic profiling and automated credit scoring with limited transparency or accountability. The submission recommends that Uganda’s AI strategy should establish clear safeguards and oversight standards for both existing and future AI systems.

While AI presents significant opportunities for improving public service delivery and supporting development priorities, CIPESA stresses that such systems must be built using representative local datasets, and designed in ways that minimise bias, exclusion, and discriminatory outcomes.

The organisation further stresses that AI governance must be inclusive and participatory. The submission calls for meaningful involvement of civil society organisations, academia, technical experts, and affected communities in shaping Uganda’s AI strategy. It also recommends multilingual and accessible AI-enabled platforms that support citizen participation through channels that are accessible to underserved and low-literacy communities.

Beyond governance safeguards, CIPESA urges the government to invest in local AI research, innovation, and infrastructure development. It recommends support for universities, innovation hubs, and local startups, alongside the establishment of national AI research centres and dedicated funding mechanisms. Earlier recommendations by CIPESA also proposed the creation of a national AI Research Fund and citizen awareness programmes to improve public understanding of AI technologies and their societal implications.

Without deliberate investment in local capacity, Uganda risks becoming merely a supplier of raw data to foreign technology companies while deriving limited economic value from AI technologies. This would also deepen dependence on externally developed systems that may not fully reflect local contexts, needs, or priorities.

CIPESA additionally calls for alignment between Uganda’s strategy and broader regional initiatives, including the African Union Continental AI Strategy and wider African efforts on digital governance, data protection, and platform accountability.

Ultimately, CIPESA argues that Uganda’s AI and Emerging Technologies Strategy should put people first, ensuring that innovation and emerging technologies are matched with clear safeguards and meaningful oversight.

Read the full submission here: CIPESA Submissions on Uganda AI and Emerging Technology Strategy

01May

Tanzania’s Digital Rights Record Faces Fresh Scrutiny at the UPR

Author CIPESA Posted on

By Ainembabazi Patricia |

In November 2026, Tanzania will be up for its fourth cycle review under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC). Ahead of the review, the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA), the Pan African Lawyers Union (PALU), and JamiiAfrica made a joint stakeholder submission on the state of digital rights including expression, access to information, assembly and association, privacy, data protection, and gender equality in digital spaces in Tanzania.

The submission recognises the positive steps taken by Tanzania to advance the digital ecosystem  since its previous assessment in 2021. Internet connectivity has expanded significantly, and the country has adopted important digital governance measures. These include the enactment of the Personal Data Protection Act, 2022, and the establishment of the Personal Data Protection Commission, reforms to the Media Services Act, and policy initiatives such as the Digital Economy Strategic Framework 2024–2034, and emerging AI governance frameworks.

However, the report finds that these gains have not translated into a freer or safer digital civic space in the country. Repressive laws and regulations continue to be used to restrict online expression, limit publications, silence dissent and elevate censorship. The Electronic and Postal Communications (Online Content) Regulations as amended in 2020 and 2025 still require licensing for online media service providers and grant the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) broad powers to suspend or revoke licences. Vague provisions in the Cybercrimes Act and related laws also continue to criminalise legitimate expression, creating a chilling effect for journalists, bloggers, activists, and ordinary users.

According to the CIPESA, PALU and JamiiAfrica report, several incidents have narrowed the environment for the exercise of online freedoms.  Key media and engagement platforms such as the Clubhouse, X (formerly Twitter) and JamiiForums were blocked in 2023 and 2025 respectively. In 2024, Tanzania’s media space was marked by intensified restrictions.  TCRA suspended Mwananchi Communications’ online platforms for 30 days on October 2, 2024, against a backdrop of broader restrictions on unregistered Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) in October 2023.

Particularly concerning were the restrictions imposed during the 2025 general elections. The report notes that Tanzania implemented a nationwide internet shutdown from October 29 to November 3, 2025, cutting off access to major social media and communication platforms. This disrupted the ability of citizens, journalists, and observers to share information, document events, and participate in public debate during a critical democratic moment.

While Tanzania in 2022 enacted the Personal Data Protection Act, which came into force in 2023, its implementation is weakened by restrictions on anonymity and VPN usage, as well as heightened surveillance. Pronouncements by government officials against sharing certain election-related content have fostered fear and self-censorship. For many Tanzanians, especially critics of government and civic actors, legal protections for personal data remain undermined by surveillance-related risks.

The submission also draws attention to the growing threat of Technology-Facilitated Gender-based Violence (TFGBV). Women journalists, politicians, activists, and other public-facing women are increasingly subjected to online harassment, sexualised abuse, doxxing, reputational attacks, and coordinated trolling. These harms were particularly acute around the 2025 elections, when gendered disinformation and intimidation converged with broader restrictions on online speech.

To address these concerns, the report recommends that Tanzania repeals or amends vague and overly broad laws including the Cybercrimes Act and the Online Content Regulations. The report calls for compliance with international human rights standards, discouraging restrictions such as internet shutdowns and platform blocking. It also calls for judicial oversight over surveillance, greater transparency in state requests to technology companies, stronger support for the Personal Data Protection Commission, investment in digital rights literacy, and explicit protections against TFGBV.

Read the full report submission here.

01May

CIPESA Condemns Zambia’s Cancellation of RightsCon 2026

Author CIPESA Posted on

By CIPESA Writer |

The Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) notes with deep concern the Government of Zambia’s decision to postpone Rights Con 2026, which was scheduled to take place in Lusaka next week. The postponement was confirmed by the organisers on April 29, 2026. Civic convenings of this nature thrive precisely because they create a safe space for diverse, sometimes uncomfortable, conversations about rights, technology, and power. Restricting that space undermines the principles of openness, dialogue, and democratic engagement on the continent.

The information provided by the Zambia government suggests that halting of RightsCon was not a necessary and proportionate measure. It has caused undue financial losses and disrupted the plans of thousands of national and international human rights actors and the local tourism, travel and conferencing sector, while also denting Zambia’s  governance credentials and international standing.

CIPESA has joined over 130 organisations from across the world in expressing concern over the  government’s decision that raises questions about transparency, civic space, and commitment to inclusive global digital governance.

The cancellation of RightsCon 2026 escalates an ongoing crisis of democratic regression and the rise of digital authoritarianism on the continent.

In a related development, the World Press Freedom Day (WPFD) Global Conference, originally scheduled to also take place in Lusaka ahead of RightsCon. has also undergone significant changes. UNESCO has announced that the conference will now be held online, while the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize ceremony will be relocated to the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France at a later date. These developments effectively delist Zambia as the host of this year’s WPFD, although a commemorative event remains scheduled for May 4, 2026.

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