Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa 2022, Lusaka (26-29 September 2022)

From Monday 26 to Thursday 29 September 2022, the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) convened the ninth edition of the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa (FIFAfrica) in Lusaka, Zambia — the first fully in-person edition of the forum since 2019, ending a three-year COVID-induced interruption. The forum brought together approximately 300 participants from 47 countries across civil society, government, the media, academia, and the private sector for four days of workshops, exhibitions, and panel discussions organised across 21 concurrent thematic tracks. The Zambia Ministry of Technology and Science partnered with CIPESA as the government host, recognising Zambia's ratification of the African Union Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection and its stated digital-transformation ambitions as a hosting rationale.

Context

FIFAfrica is CIPESA's annual convening for the internet freedom and digital rights field in Africa, established in 2014 as the continent's dedicated forum for civil society, policymakers, technologists, and journalists to address Africa-specific digital rights challenges. By 2022 the forum had become the primary annual civil-society convening point for African digital rights practitioners — structurally analogous to RightsCon for the global field or DRAPAC for the Asia-Pacific, but anchored in the East and Southern African region where CIPESA operates, with a mandate explicitly addressed to African governance contexts and the African digital regulatory landscape.

Zambia was selected as the 2022 host in recognition of its democratic governance and comparative political stability, its May 2022 ratification of the African Union's Malabo Convention (the AU Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection), and its digital-infrastructure context: approximately 20 million mobile subscriptions and 10 million mobile internet subscriptions as of 2021, against a population of roughly 19 million. CIPESA also cited Zambia's historical role in the African independence and non-alignment movements — the country hosted the Organisation of African Unity summit in 1970 and gave refuge to liberation movements from across southern Africa — as a resonant hosting context for a forum concerned with digital sovereignty and self-determination.

The 2022 forum arrived at a specific juncture in African digital rights: biometric surveillance technologies had proliferated rapidly across the continent in the preceding three years, with several African governments deploying biometric voter registration systems, national digital identity programmes, and facial-recognition-linked immigration controls with limited legal frameworks to govern them. The AI-and-Africa thematic thread at FIFAfrica 2022 addressed this wave of government biometric adoption as the primary AI-adjacent concern, predating the generative-AI public discourse that followed ChatGPT's November 2022 launch by two months.

What happened across the four days

The four-day programme split between two days of pre-events (September 26-27) — concentrated on network meetings, technical skills workshops, and community-building sessions — and two days of main forum (September 28-29) running 21 concurrent thematic tracks. This structure, consistent across recent FIFAfrica editions, gives technical and civil-society practitioners dedicated working time before the broader, multi-stakeholder main forum.

The main forum's 21 tracks spanned the digital rights field as it appears in African contexts: AI in Africa, data governance and data protection, biometric surveillance and privacy, digital economy, child online protection, disinformation and information integrity, platform accountability, women's rights online, strategic digital rights litigation, and ranking digital rights in Africa with assessment of telecom operator practices — alongside eleven further tracks addressing sub-regional and thematic concerns. The African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms Coalition hosted dedicated sessions at the forum, convening coalition members and prospective signatories around the Declaration's internet governance principles as a civil-society standard-setting exercise distinct from the African Union's intergovernmental instruments.

A Digital Security Hub ran throughout the forum, staffed by Access Now, CIPESA, Digital Society of Africa, Digital Security Alliance, Encrypt Uganda, Internews, Jigsaw (Google's technology incubator), Greenhost, Defend Defenders, and Zaina Foundation — providing one-on-one digital security support and forensic assistance to journalists, human rights defenders, and civil society practitioners attending the forum. The hub model, developed by Access Now and deployed at major civil-society convenings, gives at-risk participants access to device audits, threat assessments, and practical protective measures in the same location as the policy and advocacy sessions they attend.

The forum's signature output was the launch of CIPESA's State of Internet Freedoms in Africa 2022 Report on the final day (29 September), timed for maximum civil-society and media visibility at the close of the main forum. The 2022 edition of the annual report focused on biometric surveillance technologies, documenting increased African government appetite for biometric systems across civil registration, electoral processes, immigration controls, financial services inclusion, and telecommunications identity verification. The report found that data protection legislative frameworks across many African nations remained inadequate to govern these deployments — either absent, unenforced, or pre-digital in their framing — and documented patterns of targeting and profiling of journalists and civil society members through surveillance-adjacent biometric data collection. Its stakeholder recommendations addressed governments (enact identity laws compliant with data protection standards; ratify the Malabo Convention), civil society (document abuses; advocate for institutional frameworks), media (expose privacy violations from biometric programmes), private sector (ensure human rights compliance in system development), and academia (research challenges and benefits of biometric initiatives).

Paradigm Initiative and Association for Progressive Communications (APC) participated across sessions, consistent with their roles as pan-African and global digital-rights anchors in the corpus.

Significance

The Lusaka forum is the corpus's first Event entry for Zambia, the first Event entry in the FIFAfrica series, and the first East and Southern Africa annual-convening event in the corpus — closing the sub-regional gap that the Paradigm Initiative DRIF26 (West Africa, 2026) does not cover and that the SMEX Bread & Net (West Asia and North Africa) and Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly 2023 (Asia-Pacific) address in other regions. FIFAfrica is the primary annual field convening for East and Southern African digital rights practitioners; its absence from the corpus was a structural gap in the Africa-wide convening layer.

The 2022 edition's thematic focus on biometric surveillance places it as the corpus's earliest dedicated treatment of African government AI deployment in a civic-society convening context. The AI-in-Africa track and the State of Internet Freedoms report together document the specific form AI harms were taking on the continent in 2022 — not generative AI (ChatGPT launched two months later) but the algorithmic and biometric governance systems that African governments were adopting from Chinese and European vendors with minimal civil-society or legislative oversight. This positions the Lusaka forum as a temporal marker: the moment at which African civil society collectively named biometric surveillance as the dominant AI-adjacent threat to the rights framework — a concern that subsequently fed into the AU's emerging AI governance work and into the African regional internet rights community's evidence base.

The forum also demonstrates the hub model for digital safety infrastructure at civil-society convenings — Access Now's Digital Security Hub, running across 10 organisations — as a live practice the corpus's African digital rights orgs deploy at scale, distinct from the more policy-focused session tracks. This model of embedded technical security support at advocacy convenings is a structural feature of how the digital rights field protects its most exposed practitioners, and FIFAfrica 2022 is the corpus's first Event entry in which the hub model appears explicitly as part of the programme record.