Africa’s large working-age population, its growing middle class, and the significant share of services are all ingredients for value adding trade and investment relationships.

cooperation with these emerging powers could keep the door open to US influence in Africa, and could help ensure that Beijing’s strategic foothold in the continent does not deepen.

Huawei and Chinese phone maker ZTE have built nearly 80 percent of Africa’s third-generation (3G) network infrastructure, while Huawei has built 70 percent of all fourth-generation (4G) networks and is competing to build all the future 5G networks in Africa.

The network is operational in 48 African countries with its hub located in Dakar, Senegal. In September 2018, India’s Ministry of External Affairs launched a new network project – e-VidyaBharati and e-Arogya Bharati (e-VBAB). The e-VBAB project is different from the earlier PAeN project. While the PAeN project operated on satellite-based technology, the e-VBAB will establish two separate web-based portals – one each for tele-education and tele-medicin

As a beginning, India has already signed MoUs/joint statements with six African countries on the subject — i.e., Morocco, Egypt, Seychelles, South Africa, Kenya, and Mauritius.

EMBASSIES,

Methodology for Benchmarking Assessment

As of 2019, there were 631 online marketplaces in Africa managing 1,900 websites in 58 countries and territories. These marketplaces recorded about 2.2 billion visits that year. Although these numbers may seem large, they are small by international standards. For example, Amazon.com had estimated traffic of 26.73 billion in 2019, while eBay.com had 10.47 billion and AliExpress.com had 6.66 billion.

While Chinese companies have benefitted from highly de-regulated media markets, where the entry costs for foreign companies is relatively low, African media would face a much more restricted environment were they to try to explore the Chinese media ecosystem; this applies to content creators, tech firms, and telecommunications companies

which works alongside the China Public Diplomacy Association, a non-profit organisation that brings together media outlets, learning institutions, and global firms.

Writing for The China Africa Project, Alexandria Williams, a journalist based in Nairobi, notes that “Chinese tech companies have aggressively pursued projects that provide free or reduced services in exchange for African data”.201 That is the case of Opera’s business in Nigeria, where the company has been able to acquire a very large and diverse volume of personal data from its users. In September 2020, amidst debates around TikTok’s business practices elsewhere, Falhad Dikow, a Kenyan Senator, asked to “investigate the use of TikTok and whether Kenyan users’ data are secure”.202 In her address, Senator Dikow did not raise specific concerns about TikTok’s being owned by a Chinese company. Similar debates around data privacy, specifically as it refers to tech companies from China, have yet to take place in other parts of the continent

While TikTok does not publicise how many users it has in each country, it regularly appears among the most downloaded apps in countries like South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, where its user base appears to be the strongest in Africa.191 Further proof of TikTok’s popularity among African users can be seen in the 2018 launch of Vskit, another video-sharing app. Vskit is run by Transsnet, a joint venture of two Chinese companies, Transsion, a mobile phone manufacturer, and NetEase, one of China’s first web portals.192

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a privately owned Chinese company. It effectively entered the African market in mid-2018, after purchasing Musical.ly, w

news content is increasingly adversarial and belligerent; coordinated disinformation campaigns are becoming more frequent; and new actors, including privately owned media, are being mobilised.

The way Beijing has communicated with the world during the Covid-19 outbreak signals a change of approach.

Prof Chu Yin of the University of International Relations in Beijing justified this new approach to “diplomacy” by saying that “China’s rising status in the world requires it to safeguard its national interests in an unequivocal way”.

say scholars Zhao Huang and Rui Wang, are now exercising “less restraint, discretion, and caution than might typically be expected from Chinese officials who speak in public or post on social media”

Not only has the number of accounts risen in a short period, but the way diplomats — and some embassies — interact is different from what most Chinese media had been doing on social media for years. Aside from promoting their own activities, and reposting messages from Chinese media, these accounts are now more engaged in some form of “dialogue” with audiences through the use of hashtags and mentions.

Between January 2018 and May 2020, more than 30 embassies and diplomats based in Africa have created accounts on Twitter. These include the embassies in Mauritania, Liberia, Angola, DRC, Algeria, Mali, Uganda and Kenya, as well as several diplomats, such as China’s Ambassador to Uganda, the Deputy Ambassador to Zimbabwe, and the Economic and Commercial Counsellor at the embassy in Rwanda. Some, like Lin Jing, China’s Consul General in Cape Town (South Africa), are posting and retweeting at a significant pace.

In October 2015, CCTV Africa’s (now CGTN Africa) Facebook page was liked by less than half a million users. By early October 2020, that number had gone up to 4.7 million. Those following CGTN Africa’s YouTube channel have gone from 28 000 in 2015 to over half a million in 2020. Xinhua’s global Facebook page — which has several localised platforms in Africa, depending on each user’s language settings — had more than 86 million followers in 2020, compared to 2.2 million in October 2015, and 4.8 million in March 2016.160

n 2018, in Kenya and Nigeria, between 7% and 8% of people said they had watched CGTN Africa sometime in the previous week. In South Africa, the number was 2%. That is far below the BBC, for example, which was a source of information for at least 20% of people. CRI’s radio listenership was minimal (less than 1% in all three countries), and so was readership of China Daily, either on paper or online (around 1%)

According to former Chinese Ambassador to South Africa, Li Songtian, Huawei technology has been used in 70% of “the backbone networking infrastructure” in Africa,85 which is a crucial component in mobile and other forms of wireless communication. With ZTE technology accounting for another 10%, it is rather evident that Chinese companies do have the upper hand on the continent, where Huawei first started operating in 1997, after receiving a US$4 million contract in Kenya.

Between 2000 and 2014, Chinese companies and State agencies committed to spending around US$4.8 billion in over 100 projects in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector in Africa, according to AidData, a project led by researchers at the College of William & Mary, Development Gateway, and Brigham Young University.

Their businesses span from building telecommunications networks, to pay television services and digital content creation.

Treating all Chinese enterprises involved in media cooperation activities as a coordinated single unit with similar organisational values, operational logic, and long-term goals might lead to wrongly concluding there is homogeneity of action.

This lack of a cohesive strategy is not unique to China’s activities in Africa. Writing about Beijing’s foreign policy in general, including its public diplomacy work in Africa and elsewhere, David Shambaugh, professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University in the US, has noted that China lacks a “grand strategy”

he Chinese government feels at ease in Africa because it has found a politically welcoming environment.

Promoters of GPGs mistakenly assume that a degree of force, coercion and manipulation are a necessity, while in fact people are perfectly capable of working together and hence achieve better results that fit local circumstances (Ostrom 1992).

Although both the commons and the GPG frameworks can still serve a useful descriptive and analytical function, they are also actively used to promote certain solutions for perceived problems in a normative sense.

In this respect, the definition of a global issue as either a commons or a GPGs problem, determines to a great extent the institutional arrangements, and governance mechanisms applied to tackle it

We, therefore, argue that framing issues either in terms of commons or in terms of GPGs, should no longer be seen as based solely on traditional, objective criteria of excludability and rivalry, but that it has important normative components as well.

‘the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks’

This implies that there is something in the nature of public goods and common-pool resources (CPRs) which determines their place on the rivalry-excludability spectrum and sees a commons as the governance arrangement for these objectively identified CPRs.

Over the last years, the concepts seem to have lost practical meaning in framing discussions on exactly the same notions, for example of ‘knowledge’ (as a commons: Hess and Ostrom 2007; Frischmann et al. 2014; or as a GPG: Stiglitz 1999; Maskus and Reichman 2004) or ‘cultural heritage’ (as a commons: Gonzalez 2014; as a GPG: Francioni 2012). They are now sometimes even mentioned as synonyms, for example in the field of development (Severino 2001). The added value of this article is to confront both discourses in an attempt to bring some clarity in the distinction between commons and GPGs, and–more importantly–shed light on the diverging normative implications.

These two ‘buzzwords’ are now too often confused or even conflated, without acknowledging their divergent normative bias

The good news is that small gestures of appreciation can have an outsized effect on employee satisfaction and loyalty. The bad news is that they are not meant to be scaled up.

From 2000 to 2014 Chinese aid and, especially, loans meant only America gave more development finance. More than half China’s development projects were in Africa.

Africa and China both have 1.4bn people but China is a single, brutally disciplined one-party state, and its economy accounts for nearly 20% of world output. Africa is a continent of 54 mostly weak countries, and its economy is worth only 3% of the world’s.

Africans appreciate China’s economic role but prefer democracy and freedom to authoritarianism.

Taiwan is worried about the security of its chip industryDate: Thu, 26 May 2022

During a campaign visit to lol Park, an e-sports venue in Seoul, Yoon Suk-yeol, South Korea’s new president, asked gamers for ideas on how to improve the perception of gaming among parents, who think it is addictive and a waste of time.

There are some 685m gamers in China, including those who play on their phones, compared with 33m in South Korea

China is now on the rise. Chinese companies are at the heart of gaming globally. The country’s biggest tech firm, Tencent, owns Riot Games, which developed lol, as well as 40% of Epic Games, which makes Fortnite. They are among the most popular games in the world. Interest in the pastime has grown, too

“Rather as with the kgb, the difficulty has been in telling truth to power,”

“If you're searching through massive data, your results are only as good as your queries.”

Perhaps Mr Putin did forewarn Mr Xi and convince him it would be done in days. But given China’s reputed capabilities, its lack of contingency planning and situational awareness suggests a serious intelligence failure. The heartening conclusion for many Western governments is that China's spies are not always as good as advertised.

Russia should not be humiliated

“Can violence be fought with violence?”

Eastern hawks, notably in Poland and the Baltics, fear that anything other than an unambiguous defeat of the Russian invasion will encourage Vladimir Putin to attack them next.

One of the attractions of the workplace is that it is a place where there is a shared endeavour. That endeavour is called “work”. You need to be friendly to be a good colleague, but you don’t need to be friends. You need to be capable of empathy, but you don’t need to constantly emote. You have to turn up, try hard and play your part. You have to bring your role self.

Any job that involves a uniform is by definition asking employees to subsume their personalities, not express them.

A company is a hierarchy, in which even the most understanding bosses expect people to follow orders rather than their hearts.

Behind this thought lies a good intention—or rather lots of good intentions. The notion of the whole self variously captures the idea that people are more engaged in work if they believe in a firm’s purpose; that teams are more effective if colleagues understand each other; that people with different identities should feel comfortable in their own skins; that firms should care about and respond to issues that affect their staff’s well-being, from mental health to child care; and that leaders need to show some of their personal side to be connected with their staff.

when we see some systemic flaws in sectors, which are best tackled in a systemic manner, that I'm relying on base

nd so the question came to the fore like, are these antitrust instruments, the best suited to deal with these issues? And we quite quickly saw that that was not a case for two reasons.

he digital transformation

This is linked to the evolution of international relations and the multiplication of diplomatic actors over the past twenty years,"

society is still very much stuck on the cliché of the 'Ferrero Rocher' diplomat,"

We work 14 hours a day, and the consequences of the workload on our personal lives, when we have a family and must go abroad, are sometimes difficult to handle.

Being a diplomat is not a job that you take on without thinking about its implications, in terms of your personal life or training,"

but the problem is that it relies on a generalist administration, whereas for certain professions, specialists are needed.

"My skills consist in having a thorough knowledge of a geographical area, as well as the foreign languages I speak. I am not going to become a prefect. We are not interchangeable.”

"Our profession is one that we learn over time and through our experiences on the ground,"

budget cuts that have seen staffing fall some 20% since 2007.

of state administrators in which senior civil servants will no longer be attached to a specific administration.

would mean "the end of French professional diplomacy”.

diplomats deal with existential questions about their shifting role.

Each action

he AU’s Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa 2020 – 2030,114 and offer governments a roadmap for how to update their digital economy strategies and plans.

for peer-learning initiatives,

that theyplayed an important role in catalysing political will within the government, and some said that they had provided them a meaningful opportunity to learn from their peers

Using the Digital Economy Blueprint as a reference, countries scored differently on measures of digital governance, infrastructure development, ICT skills, and innovation

aying the foundation for more regional integration and trade, and many were working on regional e-commerce and mobile interoperability.

as well as pursue global alignment

regional networks are one of the best forums for countries to find alignment on such objectives

required significant legal and regulatory work (and sometimes a high level of political risk), including e-government, digital identity, data privacy and protection, and cybersecurity.

By cooperating through such regional bodies, countries have begun to promote common understanding around the legal and policy frameworks for responsible and sustainable digital transformation.

to align national digital strategies, regulations, and infrastructure with regional frameworks and initiatives, with the goal of improving national and shared regional outcomes.

to address the need for cross-functional capabilities rather than technical expertise on its own, governments expressed some movement toward whole-of-government processes in managing human and technical capacity, though this was in its early stages.

Several countries highlighted examples of expert panel discussions, short-term training, and peer learning sessions within or across countries that could provide opportunities for government employees to refresh ICT skills and learn about emerging technologies, including 5G, data analytics, cyber security, and distributed ledgers

Countries recognise that human capacity development and a human-centered transformation are key enablers of successful digital transformation.

sectoral silos continue to impede harmonisation of planning across government, and the downstream effects of this lack of coordination are particularly evident during emergencies like the recent pandemic

Closely related to the need for improving digital skills and values in rural areas was inclusion and access, which were often core themes of the infrastructure extension and connectivity issues mentioned by officials in their responses.

digital inclusion that countries were working on included e-payment, ICT for gender, financial inclusion, and ICT for disability.

Governments continue to be challenged by the need to invest in physical infrastructure, whether through internal or external sources

recognisesiloedinvestmentsandduplicativeefforts by ICT development partners as a problem, and they also recognise issues in coordination between ICT ministries and promoting a whole-of-government approach

ncluding sectoral planning, silos, and procurement,

lacked either leadership or a coordination mechanism (a key driver of intragovernmental coordination) and many said they experienced challenges related to stakeholder commitment and integration of common approaches.

an aspiration or ongoing project rather than a fully executed reality.

hey were told that whole of government refers to coordination and resource-sharing across government ministries and agencies with the intent of achieving ICT policy/strategy objectives

Coordination and horizontal integration are important elements of digital government, so addressing these issues is critical in delivering a whole-of-government approach to ICT adoption and use, as well as promoting and investing in the digital economy

lack a timetable for actions and key performance indicators (KPIs),

itwasfoundthatfivecountries have strategies that are more than fiveyearsoldandareinimmediateneedofupdating.

Digital skills for public sector officialsallowforimproveddecision-makingaround digital strategy, and subsequently increase the potential for successfully navigating digital strategy implementation

Another positive sign is the proliferation of digital ID systems in almost all the countries, albeit at different stages of universal rollout. A good example is Kenya, with the deployment of its National Integrated Identity Management System, known as Huduma Namba

Unlocking the Digital Economy in Africa: Benchmarking the Digital Transformation Journey | 17FIGURE 5Indices Used for Benchmarking Assessment Using Secondary Data

harmonising national ICT strategies and regulatory frameworks becomes critical,

This divide is particularly acute in Africa, where increasing connectivity is transforming the continent and integrating people into the digital economy.

at the nexus of policy frameworks, digital platforms, and peer learning, with particular success in regional policy harmonisation and global alignment.

Developing human capacity entails promoting a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship across society, as well as upskilling and improving the capacity of the existing government workforce.

mproving fragmented digital governance by deploying coordinated ICT strategies and harmonized policy and regulatory frameworks

efforts to renew these strategies (with a focus on digital economy and whole-of-government coordination) are just beginning.

Most countries have ICT strategies or plans in place, though very few arespecifictocreatingadigitaleconomy.

countries need to collectively build ecosystems that facilitate digital integration—regionally and continentally

Digital Government, Digital Business, Infrastructure, Innovation-Driven Entrepreneurship, and Digital Values and Skills

the launch of the Digital Economy Blueprint by the Republic of Kenya,

Pioneered by the government of Kenya, the blueprint highlights fivepillarsasafoundationforcreatingadigital economy and underscores the need for countries to adopt user-centric and whole-of-government processes in promoting outcomes for the whole-of-society

Share of Economies With Relevant E-Commerce Legislation in Africa, by region, 2017 (%

to Agenda 2063

Leverage synergies with existing regional and international initiatives with shared goals

Establish national cyber-security governance structures under multi-stakeholder structures (involving policy makers,economic,educational, technical and business communities, legal, law enforcement, Academia, diplomatic, military ...etc.)

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVESTO DRIVE THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TO PROPEL INDUSTRIALIZATION IN AFRICA AND CONTRIBUTE TO THE DIGITAL ECONOMY AND SUPPORT AFCFTA

Africa has fewer legacy challengesto deal with and is therefore adopting digitized solutions faster out of necessity. For Africa, the current moment offers a leapfrogging opportunity. Today’s technologies indicate the scale and speed at which technology is transforming traditional socio-economic sectors.

Just 9% of Tanzanians surveyed in April for The Economist by Premise had watched China’s flagship news channel in the latest month. By comparison 73% had watched the bbc. Across the seven countries Premise surveyed, cgtn did best in Congo, where 28% of respondents had watched it in the latest month. But 73% had seen France24. (The survey skews slightly to wealthier and more urban than average, but the ages of respondents are representative).

Yet some African regimes have made use of Chinese know-how to go after dissidents and journalists. The Wall Street Journal reported that in Zambia in 2019 the Cybercrime Crack Squad, a unit of the telecoms regulator, enlisted the help of Huawei to track down and arrest bloggers for an opposition news site. It also found that in Uganda in 2018 frustrated security officials had asked Huawei employees to help crack WhatsApp communications by the leader of an opposition movement. Huawei engineers penetrated a group chat, enabling Ugandan authorities to arrest the opposition figure and dozens of supporters and thwart plans for street demonstrations. (Huawei has denied that its employees conduct any such hacking).

a Chinese initiative to deliver satellite tv to “10,000 villages” in Africa.

StarTimes, a Chinese satellite firm, is strong in digital television. Its public profile in Africa is as a tv provider, serving 13m subscribers in half of Africa’s 54 countries (plus 27m more customers across the continent who get content over the internet). Less visibly, it is helping 15 African countries migrate from analogue to digital transmission, according to a tally by Dani Madrid-Morales of the University of Sheffield.

China brings officials from African countries to seminars on “cyberspace management”. At one such event in 2017 Freedom House, a non-profit group based in Washington, dc, found that attendees were given a tour of systems for “public-opinion management”, including “real-time monitoring of negative public opinion” and tools to guide public opinion to be more positive.

Last year People’s Daily Online, the website of China’s official mouthpiece, started a Swahili-language service.

Davos needs the world more than the world needs Davos. That isn’t to say there are no mutual benefits.

Attendance seemed down on previous years—by half or so, chief executives reckoned.

But investigators trying to detect sanctions-cheaters—for government agencies, pressure groups, or insurers and other businesses—are encountering a surge of help from an unexpected quarter.

But investigators trying to detect sanctions-cheaters—for government agencies, pressure groups, or insurers and other businesses—are encountering a surge of help from an unexpected quarter.

But investigators trying to detect sanctions-cheaters—for government agencies, pressure groups, or insurers and other businesses—are encountering a surge of help from an unexpected quarter.

“This is really interesting, because then you can interrogate any fiber under the sea, covering all of the Earth,”

Where there’s cable, there’s potential data.

Every 60 to 80 kilometers, usually, you need an optical amplifier, which essentially takes the incoming light and amplifies it,”

These very words may have flown through an undersea cable before reaching your eyeballs. Hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optics crisscross the world’s oceans, shuttling emails, Netflix shows, and news articles as packets of light. And, scientifically speaking, boy does that light have a story to tell—not so much about what happens on land, but what happens in the deep.

Peace, security and human rights 2. Prosperity3. Sustainability4. Digitalisation

Combining bilateral and multilateral levels also strengthens the position of International Geneva.

The first World Data Forum was held in South Africa in 2017

Flourish chord diagrams

Equatorial Guinea

China is involved in financing, building or operating 61 ports in 30 African countries,

The original pretext for its base was to support anti-piracy missions in the Gulf of Aden.

“They have placed bets from Mauritania in the north to Namibia in the south and in many countries in-between,

a practical approach to making the country richer, mixing market reforms with state control.

African employees make up 70-95% of Chinese firms’ workforces, according to a recent summary of the evidence.

But turning to China was often the only option. The West should offer an alternative.

A less patronising Western approach would be well-timed.

Build Back Better World (b3w), is seen as a response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It was followed more recently by the eu’s Global Gateway infrastructure-for-Africa plan.

the Trump administration’s rigid approach of telling countries they must make a binary choice between America and China.

but also the sense of not being patronised

To seize it means resisting the temptation to see everything China does as part of a zero-sum game.

asked Africans in seven countries, a mix of democracies and authoritarian states, which would be more powerful in a decade’s time: China or America. In all seven the answer was China. Overwhelmingly they also felt that China’s influence was favourable, as well.

China prides itself on a “demand-driven” approach: doing what African leaders want, to hell with technocrats in finance ministries. In Congo the “deal of the century” signed with Joseph Kabila in 2007 swapped mining rights for infrastructure projects. In Ethiopia China helped Meles Zenawi’s push for industrialisation. In Kenya China supported Uhuru Kenyatta’s “Vision 2030”, notably via the standard-gauge railway (sgr), its largest infrastructure project since independence.

Attempts to exempt smaller firms from the most onerous rules are welcome.

to allow users to choose sanitised versions of websites

Over-blocking, arbitrary enforcement and the chilling of legitimate discussion is thus built into the legislation.

Anyone who spends time on social media knows that such content-moderation algorithms are already arbitrary and inconsistent, banning some people for trivialities while leaving others untouched for flagrant breaches of the rules

firms will have strong incentives to block anything even remotely controversial first and ask questions later—or, more likely, not at all.

to delegate enforcement to the same tech companies that the government says have failed to police themselves properly in the past.

to be known as “legal but harmful”

The government hopes to stamp down on, among other things, death threats, knife sales, assisting people to commit suicide, the glamourisation of anorexia, vaccine scepticism, fraudulent advertising and racist abuse directed at England’s football team.

the bar should be high, and the rules should be applied carefully, frugally and narrowly

The bill will require tens of thousands of internet firms, from foreign giants like Facebook and Google to niche web forums, to do more to protect their users, on pain of fines of 10% of their worldwide revenue, or even being blocked entirely.

Inefficient international institutions may collapse amid an accelerating arms race, nuclear proliferation and the multiplication of regional conflicts. Such change would lead only to more chaos in the years ahead.

That would lead to a reformation of the global order, with major changes to the UN system, archaic norms of international public law and recalibrations at the IMF, the WTO and other bodies.

If a deal with Mr Putin is possible, a deal with Xi Jinping would be a logical continuation.

the final outcome of the collision between the Russian and the Ukrainian models will be postponed.

Triumph for Ukraine might lead to a tamed and domesticated Russia. A quiet Russia would allow the West to cope more easily with China, which would be the only major obstacle to liberal hegemony and the long-awaited “end of history”.

it is about our understanding of modernity itself and, consequently, about our preferred models of social and political development.

two views on the modern international system and on the world at large; two opposing perceptions of what is right and what is wrong, what is fair and what is not, what is legitimate and what is illegitimate and of what national leadership should entail.

very different ways of organising social and political life

The other three goals are to make supply chains more resilient; to promote infrastructure investment and clean energy; and to form new rules on taxation and anti-corruption.

with high standards for workers’ rights and e-commerce rules.

Even if policymakers can ease the way for the likes of Mr Shevchik to come, America must still tackle an emerging talent gap with its principal geopolitical rival, China. China awards over 100,000 more advanced degrees every year than America does. America’s byzantine immigration system excels at kicking out foreign-born graduates. The place remains attractive to skilled foreigners—if only it will let them in.

Data Poisoning is an adversarial attack that tries to manipulate the training dataset in order to control the prediction behavior of a trained model such that the model will label malicious examples into a desired classes (e.g., labeling spam e-mails as safe).