United Nations Foundation

The Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) is a nonprofit initiative of the United Nations Foundation dedicated to ensuring all people benefit from the potential of digital technologies to improve access to critical public and private services and to fuel innovation economies while mitigating the downside risk of data abuses such as enabling surveillance and repression, exacerbating the exclusion of vulnerable individuals and communities, and undermining competitive markets. The Africa Data Leadership Initiative (ADLI) is a peer engagement and learning network for senior Africa-based practitioners tackling the thorniest data policy and governance issues. It works to build the capacity of decision makers across the continent through exchange of knowledge and experiences within a values-oriented framework designed to expand the value of data for governments, markets, and people while safeguarding key civil liberties. In this growth stage, ADLI will expand participation in the network from five to 16 countries, and create new cohorts of parliamentarians and government digital technology coordinators — leaders of agencies charged with executing national digital policies. The grant will also broaden the types of engagement offered, and invest in durable infrastructure for peer exchange and knowledge discovery, creating cross-border collaboration to support data governance approaches designed by and for Africans, and support the development of a sustainable revenue model to support the network in the long term. 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. The goal of this cluster is to help governments in East and West Africa develop policy frameworks that balance public good uses of data with data privacy and protection.

The United Nations Foundation serves as the institutional host of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD), which brings together government, private-sector, civil society, and international institutions to harness new and traditional sources of data to better understand and address development challenges. This grant will support the implementation of the partnership’s new strategic plan, which seeks to solve three major problems: (a) how to harness up-to-date data to ensure decisions are informed by current and changing contexts; (b) how to safely include and represent all people in data and the data value chain; and (c) how to govern data fairly and safely. This grant supports the Evidence-Informed Policymaking strategy goal that governments in East and West Africa make better use of data to improve decision making and outcomes for people.