Organised By:
📅 Date: 10TH & 11TH MARCH 2026
Navigating Duality in Data Governance: Innovation and Accountability in East Africa
East Africa is experiencing a profound digital shift. Governments are digitising services, innovators are deploying new tools, and citizens generate unprecedented volumes of data every day. Yet the same systems that promise inclusion and efficiency also raise new risks — shrinking civic space, expanding surveillance, algorithmic bias, and fragmented regulatory frameworks.
The East Africa Data Governance Conference 2026 brings together leaders, practitioners, and thinkers to engage honestly with this moment. The region stands at a crossroads where innovation and accountability must be held together. This conference creates a space to explore that duality — to examine the opportunities of data-driven transformation while confronting the governance challenges that define East Africa’s digital future.
Over two days, participants will interrogate the realities shaping data governance across the region and co-create practical ideas for strengthening rights, trust, and responsible innovation.
Conference Theme: Navigating Duality in Data Governance
Innovation and accountability are often treated as competing imperatives. In reality, they must evolve together. The 2026 theme focuses on the duality that defines East Africa’s digital moment — a region building new systems of data-driven governance while grappling with heightened concerns around privacy, power, surveillance, exclusion, and fragmentation. The conference explores how East Africa can build digital governance ecosystems that enable innovation without sacrificing justice, rights, or public trust.
Conference Pillars
The conversations will be organised around five pillars:
- Data Ownership and Custodianship: Interrogating who holds rights over citizen-generated data and how custodianship should function across states, corporations, platforms, and public service systems.
- Sovereignty and Cross-Border Governance: Exploring how the region can assert control over data, resist digital dependence, and create harmonised approaches for cross-border data flows and regional integration.
- Infrastructure, Interoperability, and Standards: Understanding the foundations of trustworthy digital governance; infrastructure design, interoperability, data portability, cybersecurity, and integrated architectures.
- Ethics, Algorithms, and Accountability: Addressing algorithmic fairness, transparency, discrimination, and regulatory capacity as AI and automation shape decision-making in public and private sectors.
- Economics and the Value of Data: Examining the political economy of data — how value is created, who benefits, and what models ensure that citizens and public institutions share in the returns.
Each pillar recognises the region’s complexity and invites exploration rooted in evidence, practice, and lived experience.
Programme Structure
Plenaries: High-level dialogues unpacking regional realities, tensions, and shared priorities. Breakout Sessions: Participatory discussions under each pillar allow for deeper exploration and collaborative problem-solving. Demonstration Labs: Showcases of tools, platforms, and methods shaping responsible data governance and innovation. Roundtables: Focused discussions among regulators, civic actors, researchers, and innovators to develop actionable insights. Public Dialogues: Open sessions that anchor the conversation in lived experience and civic realities.
Expected Outcomes
The conference will generate: A Regional Reflection Paper on data governance trends, gaps, and opportunities in East Africa. A Framework for Responsible Innovation, balancing technological progress with rights and accountability. A Network Charter enabling continued collaboration among regional actors. Policy and practice recommendations on data ownership, sovereignty, interoperability, ethics, and the economics of data. Strengthened partnerships across the ecosystem, driving East Africa’s digital transformation.