Negotiating Africa’s Digital Partnerships

Rising geopolitical tensions among China, the United States and other major powers are making digital partnership negotiations between African stakeholders and these global actors more complex. Negotiating Africa’s Digital Partnerships — a policy research project supported by CIGI and hosted at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford — looks at how these partnerships are formed as African governmental actors seek new and rising partners, such as China, to help build their digital capacity. The project involves interviews with African ministers, policy makers, the private sector, and civil society actors from both francophone and anglophone Africa with a focus on digital connectivity, infrastructure, digital sovereignty, norm-setting and governance issues.

Co-led by Folashadé Soulé, the project’s first phase culminated in this special report, which presents a compilation of the interviews conducted and provides valuable insights into the perceptions of African strategies in digital governance, as well as actionable recommendations for African governments and stakeholders negotiating digital partnerships across a range of subjects.

On Thursday, September 26, join Folashadé Soulé and Jane Munga at a public round table event (in person or via Zoom), presented by the Africa Forum at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, in collaboration with CIGI, for a discussion of the project and its findings. Learn more and register here.

In spring 2024, to remove speedbumps and veto points in lending to countries undergoing debt restructuring, the International Monetary Fund introduced changes to four policies and procedures: Lending into Official Arrears, Financing Assurances, the Approval in Principle procedure and emergency financing provisions. The Fund introduced a new, fourth channel through which it can lend into official arrears when, after due notice, no objection to doing so has been raised.

In the introduction to his latest paper, C. Randall Henning writes that “these policies are prime examples of convoluted rules and methods that are nonetheless necessary for operating an official multilateral institution in a correspondingly complicated issue area, and this paper is intended to serve as a guide to understanding these reforms and provide an early assessment of their likely impact.”

In most parts of the world, regulators’ ability to put rules in place to govern the use of new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has been rapidly outpaced by the technologies’ development. Many of AI’s problems are inherently global, which means that if regulation takes place in a loose patchwork, solutions will be evasive.

In this paper, David Evan Harris and Anamitra Deb argue that in the context of the urgent need for truly meaningful regulation of AI, philanthropy has an opportunity to quickly leverage its stores of uniquely public-interest-bound “risk capital” to create the Interim International AI Institution. While numerous efforts are under way to start conversations and study what a possible international or intergovernmental AI governance body might look like, this proposal suggests simply putting forth the funding and prototyping the organization by beginning the work today.

In 2019, the Trump administration blocked key semiconductor manufacturing equipment, such as extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, from being sold to China. In August 2022, the Biden administration banned key electronic design automation software. Then, in October 2022, Biden implemented the advanced chip ban, which “changed the game fundamentally,” writes Alex He. Having relied heavily on foreign equipment and expertise, China is now losing ground in the chip industry.

Despite the sanctions, Huawei and SMIC achieved breakthroughs with their own chips. But their outdated manufacturing processes are not sustainable for mass production. He argues that homegrown innovation aside, as long as China remains isolated, catching up with Western semiconductor leaders is a long shot.

On September 19, the Government of Canada published a list of its national intelligence priorities and made a public case for those priorities. In this piece, Aaron Shull and Michael Den Tandt present the context in which the decision to make public a set of national intelligence priorities could not be more timely.

Further, “there is a genuine attempt here to engage with and inform Canadians about the risks and threats we face, to invite them into a discussion about how we respond as a country. The document concludes with the government’s commitment to increase public knowledge, awareness and understanding of the work of the national security and intelligence communities. In a country in which security issues have always scored lower on the list of public priorities than social issues and health care, it’s a tall order. But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Canada currently lacks a comprehensive space strategy with a vision that includes civil, defence and commercial sectors and considers how to harness the innovative potential of the private sector to drive development of new capabilities for Canada, and for commercial uses at home and abroad. In contrast, Canada’s allies have national visions and strategic policies that take a whole-of-society approach, enabling greater collaboration between government and the private sector by connecting priorities to capability development.

Growth of the global space economy is poised to accelerate in coming decades and commercial innovation is increasingly leading the way on new technologies. In this policy brief, Brian Gallant and Jordan Miller write that operationalizing the National Space Council and developing a national strategy that includes a clear role for how Canada will support commercialization of new space capabilities will signal Canada’s commitment and priorities to allies, partners and the space industrial base.

In this paper, Michael Byers outlines the many ways in which “new space technologies and a dramatic increase in commercial space capabilities” are creating “exciting opportunities for Arctic governments, communities and companies”; once isolated, the Arctic “is now part of the digital world.” Beyond supporting communications, navigation, search and rescue and scientific research across the Arctic, satellites provide security, “an enhanced understanding of what potential adversaries are doing — or not doing,” thereby helping to maintain peace and stability.

Alongside these benefits, “connectivity can create dependency and therefore exposure to new risks, which in the case of satellites include system failures, deliberate attacks and natural forces such as solar storms. Redundancies of all kinds are needed to protect against these risks.”

“AI systems increasingly control our environment through Internet of Things devices and beyond…We are also interacting ever more naturally with AI through chatbots….And there’s much more in store. As the technology advances, its ability to predict and protect against new cyberthreats will be vital for safeguarding and maintaining trust in our interconnected world. AI also promises to improve communication and training within the cyber industry, simplifying complex technical concepts and making them more accessible to a wider audience. That’s the good news. Now for the bad news.”

In this op-ed first published by the Toronto Star, Jeff Schwartzentruber reviews the risks presented by AI’s increasing integration into our lives and systems that “will turn our notion of security on its head” and how the European Union’s AI Act “couldn’t have come at a better time.”