The Datasphere Initiative

This grant renews support to the Datasphere Initiative’s Africa Forum on Sandboxes for Data project. Datasphere facilitates a process that brings together stakeholders from across sectors, conducting research on concrete data challenges and opportunities; experimenting with policy and technical data-sharing solutions; and working with decision makers to enact change in data governance narratives, policies, and strategies. Its goal is to build agile frameworks to responsibly unlock the value of data for all. This grant specifically supports Datasphere’s Africa Forum on Sandboxes for Data, which is cultivating a pan-African community to enable innovative cross-border data governance solutions. The multistakeholder process invites local, regional, and global experts to explore the ways in which regulatory and operational sandboxes could facilitate responsible data flows and exchanges — a crucial topic as the continent works to develop and implement policies on cross-border data flows as part of the African Continental Free Trade Area and implement other pan-African agreements such as the African Union's Data Policy Framework. This grant sits within a cluster of grants under the Evidence-Informed Policymaking strategy to strengthen a field of African institutions working on data governance. While Datasphere itself is not an African institution, it closely engages with many African institutions (including other grantees in this cluster). The goal of this cluster is to help governments in Africa develop policy frameworks that balance good uses of data with data privacy and protection. (Strategy: Evidence-Informed Policymaking)

This grant will support Datasphere Initiative’s Africa Forum on Sandboxes for Data project. Specifically, the project will help equip African policymakers with the necessary skills to address data governance challenges in Africa and engage community leaders and diverse networks across the region in an exchange on how to responsibly leverage data to reach Africa’s diverse development needs and economic objectives. By taking a “sandboxes” approach, the forum will spur the development and implementation of innovative data governance frameworks across borders in Africa, through a multistakeholder process, to which local, regional, and global experts will be invited to contribute and learn from each other. In addition, to share widely the knowledge generated by the forum’s activities, all interactions will be documented to develop learning modules to onboard and inform relevant communities such as parliamentarians and civil servants who are often not engaged in global digital policy debates. This grant sits within a cluster of grants under the Evidence-Informed Policymaking strategy to strengthen a field of African institutions working on data governance. While Datasphere itself is not an African institution, it will be closely engaging many African institutions (including other grantees in this cluster). The goal of this cluster is to help governments in Africa develop policy frameworks that balance good uses of data with data privacy and protection.