By Kambale Musavuli
A new pattern is reshaping global digital politics, and African nations must pay attention. This pattern is taking shape not through military force or overt political pressure, but through trade agreements that quietly restructure how data, platforms, and digital services are governed.
The recent U.S.–Malaysia trade agreement, presented as a bilateral arrangement, highlights a strategy in which powerful countries design rules that give technology companies broad access to the data of other nations. The agreement instructs Malaysia to “ensure the cross-border transfer of data by electronic means across trusted borders” and prohibits “digital services taxes … that discriminate against U.S. companies.” In practical terms, the deal limits Malaysia’s capacity to localize data, regulate foreign digital platforms, or treat data as a strategic national resource. It embeds U.S. technology companies deeply into Malaysia’s digital economy while constraining the policy space of the Malaysian state.
This is not an isolated case. It reflects a wider approach in which digital trade and cooperation agreements are used to reshape national policy space and reinforce long-term dependence on foreign digital infrastructure. The implications of this approach become clearer when similar agreements are tested against domestic legal and constitutional frameworks.
In Kenya for example, a recent multi-billion-dollar U.S.–Kenya health cooperation framework was halted by the High Court after civil society groups and legislators challenged it on constitutional grounds. The court cited concerns over limited public participation, inadequate parliamentary oversight, and insufficient safeguards for personal and epidemiological health data, including potential conflicts with Kenya’s Data Protection Act and Digital Health Act. The controversy illustrates how such agreements raise fundamental questions about data ownership, privacy, and democratic governance. These questions are increasingly debated across Europe and the Global South, even as similar arrangements advance with little public scrutiny.
Taken together, these cases point to an emerging template for the Global South. It operates through law, infrastructure, and digital flows, using legal and technical mechanisms to determine who controls data and who captures its value. Digital trade has become a central gateway for artificial intelligence systems that rely on uninterrupted access to data, storage, and computational capacity. The structure of these agreements will shape how AI develops and operates within our societies.
Artificial intelligence expands through data, cloud services, and computational power. Foreign companies currently manage most of those systems, and this concentration shapes the economic and political future of the Global South.
Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of the Republic of Ghana, explained in “Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism” that formal independence provides little protection when external actors direct the key economic structures of a nation. His insight applies to the digital era. African nations have constitutions and legal frameworks, yet foreign companies still determine the architecture of the networks, platforms, and algorithms that organize daily life. The digital environment functions as a territory with boundaries, nodes, and centers of control, and the holders of that infrastructure shape its governance.
A coordinated response is necessary. This effort draws inspiration from the recently concluded Global South Academic Forum (GSAF) 2025, and forms the foundation of what I call the Digital Bandung of the 21st Century. The original Bandung Conference of 1955 brought leaders of Africa, Asia, and Latin America together to confront domination and reshape global power relations. A Digital Bandung extends that historical mission into a world organized through data centers, cloud services, and artificial intelligence. It creates a space for countries in the Global South to establish shared standards, negotiate collectively, and develop regional digital capabilities.
The urgency of this work is visible in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country produces over 70% of the world’s cobalt, a critical mineral for electric vehicle batteries, data centers, and advanced computing, placing it at the heart of the global digital economy. Yet the human and environmental toll is severe: mining in the copper-cobalt belt has caused toxic pollution of water, soil, and air, harming the health and livelihoods of nearby communities, and cobalt extraction frequently exposes workers to dangerous conditions.
Mineral extraction shapes one part of the digital landscape, and data extraction shapes another. Africans generate digital activity through language, culture, and everyday life. This activity trains AI systems that create commercial value elsewhere. The structure resembles earlier extractive arrangements in which inputs originate in Africa while financial returns accumulate outside the continent.
As global interest in African talent increases, new programs require careful scrutiny. The launch of OpenAI’s first African AI academy at the University of Lagos has generated public enthusiasm, and it also raises important questions. In Ghana, the Minister of Communications and Digitalization recently promoted Google’s Gemini app on his official social-media account. The announcement did not describe the data policy, the protections in place for participants, or the arrangements that govern how user data is stored, accessed, or transferred.
In both cases, the public lacks clear information about how user data is stored, accessed, or used to strengthen foreign AI systems, or how value returns to local communities. Independent research shows that many AI companies retain extensive user data and metadata without clear public documentation. Weak data-governance frameworks increase the risk of exposure and enable large-scale extraction of digital activity.
Despite these efforts, recent infrastructure failures highlight the scale of vulnerability created by highly concentrated digital infrastructure. In March 2024, a subsea-cable disruption cut off millions across West Africa from the internet, exposing how few alternative routes and redundancies exist on the continent. In October 2025, a major outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted platforms, payment systems, and cloud-hosted services across several regions, with African businesses and public services facing prolonged downtime because many applications rely on externally hosted infrastructure with no local failover. This fragility was reinforced in December 2025, when another Cloudflare outage temporarily took down thousands of websites and services globally, including platforms used daily across Africa.
Unlike regions with dense data-center networks, diversified cloud providers, and strong regulatory leverage over infrastructure operators, African countries often lack local hosting capacity, bargaining power, and legal recourse. As a result, failures originating outside the continent can cascade through African economies and public services with limited ability to intervene or recover quickly, reinforcing a condition of structural digital dependency.
A long-term plan for digital sovereignty requires several commitments. Africa needs regional data centers, distributed cloud infrastructure, and resilient connectivity under African control. National legislation must emerge from African experience and community consultation. Data must be recognized as a national resource that requires public oversight. Resource flows must be transparent, and mineral wealth must contribute to the well-being of African communities. Collaboration with BRICS partners and South–South networks can strengthen the scientific foundations of AI systems developed in Africa.
These commitments are not abstract. Across Africa, early efforts already show how a sovereign digital future can begin to take shape in practice. Open-source developments offer one pathway. Models such as DeepSeek and Qwen, alongside recently released open-source AI models, create opportunities for adaptation and experimentation outside fully proprietary systems. When paired with public institutions, community participation, and sustained investment, open technologies can support AI systems that reflect local languages, knowledge, and priorities.
Practical examples are already emerging. In Ghana, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has developed language technologies that respond directly to local linguistic realities, demonstrating how AI systems can be built around African contexts rather than imported assumptions. Similar work is underway in Nigeria, where researchers are developing datasets and tools for Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo languages. In South Africa, the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research has built a multi-university research network focused on socially grounded and publicly accountable AI. Kenya’s courts and civil society have actively contested data-sharing agreements that threaten constitutional protections, while initiatives such as Beyond AI in Ghana further show how citizens, civil society, and policymakers can engage directly on data governance, artificial intelligence, and national legislation.
These efforts do not resolve structural challenges on their own, yet they provide early building blocks for collective digital infrastructure, regional coordination, and democratic oversight. They show how political ambition can begin to translate into practical capacity within the framework of a Digital Bandung.
Digital sovereignty shapes economic opportunity, public administration, and collective memory. It determines how decisions are made and how communities participate in technological change.
Earlier generations in Africa fought for political independence. This generation faces the challenge of digital independence. Subsea cables follow established routes. Data moves through systems built and governed elsewhere. Minerals from the Global South, particularly in the Congo, continue to support the infrastructure of powerful nations.
This dynamic is visible in the 2025 agreement granting KoBold Metals, a U.S. firm backed by prominent Western investors such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and working in collaboration with Stanford University’s Mineral X research center, access to the disputed Manono lithium deposit, one of the largest in the world, at a moment when the global race for AI and digital infrastructure is accelerating.
The Global South can shape a different future through coordination, shared standards, and strategic investment. A Digital Bandung offers a pathway toward that goal.
It is time to claim our minerals, our data, our infrastructures, and our collective destiny.
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Kambale Musavuli is an analyst with the Center for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa, specializing in Central and West African affairs. He is also a panafrican technology and policy strategist and the Founder of Aether Strategies, a strategic advisory firm shaping AI governance and digital self-reliance across Africa. Musavuli advises policymakers in Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo on national AI strategies.