By Toyin Akinniyi |
The history of technology is the history of time collapsing. “It took the telephone 75 years to reach 100 million users. The mobile phone got there within 16 years, Twitter in five, Facebook in four and a half. Instagram took two years, and ChatGPT landed its 100th million user in just two months“ Read that again, slowly.
We are living through the most rapid adoption of technology in human history, and we are doing it without any serious safety guardrail in place. Nowhere is this more urgent, or more personal, than in Africa. Every day, millions of children come online to platforms that were not built with them in mind, governed by regulations that are barely emerging, powered by algorithms that answer to no one. Certainly not to them.
We’ve Been Here Before, We Looked Away.
We lauded the connectivity and gawked at the upheaval of the early 2010s’ advent of social media. Now a decade later, we are paying the price: pandemic levels of fear and despair amongst young people; documented links between platform use and self-harm amongst adolescent girls and boys, and an entire generation whose sense of self was largely formed by engagement-optimised algorithms. We are in the same position now with AI, but it is faster and the stakes are high. Social media changed the way young people communicate. Now, how they think, how they learn, how they reason, how they question, and whether they even question at all, is currently being transformed by AI.
In the last few months, I have led and been in several conversations about online safety, especially for children. And I don’t think this is all a coincidence, considering the global conversation ensuing around the same subject. The thread running through all these engagements: digital governance, safety by design, technology that truly serves society, and the dilemma of profit-centric or human-centric design. What does this all look like in the African context?
Safety by design – for Africa?
In the African context, [child] safety by design collides with a structural reality: most of the platforms shaping children’s digital lives are built elsewhere, optimised for engagement metrics and advertising revenue that reflect Silicon Valley’s incentives, not the realities of a teenager in Lagos, Nairobi, or Kigali using a shared, low-cost device with patchy internet connection. This creates a governance gap that policy is only beginning to close.
The African Union’s Child Online Safety and Empowerment Policy, adopted in 2024, establishes principles around children’s right to safety, privacy, and online participation, with member states expected to translate these into national strategies. But while policy commitments are multiplying, implementation is slow. Some countries are moving from principle to practice: Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya are all considering a version or the other of laws to govern children’s use of the internet, but these remain the exception rather than the norm. And even then, many of those efforts are directed at the users rather than ensuring safety by design.
Safety-by-design principles are only as strong as the business model beneath them: a platform whose growth depends on maximising time-on-app will always be in latent tension with a child’s best interests, however well-intentioned its trust-and-safety team.
For African digital governance, the human-centric alternative means embedding child rights impact assessments into product design from the outset, not retrofitting safety features after harm surfaces; building regulatory capacity and enforcement mechanisms rather than aspirational frameworks alone; and insisting that global platforms operating in African markets meet the same design standards on the continent as they do in jurisdictions with stronger regulations, rather than treating the region as lower-risk or lower-priority.
The recently launched Africa Taskforce on Child Online Protection, coordinating governments, mobile operators, technology companies, regulators, law enforcement, civil society, and young people, is a promising structural attempt at exactly this: moving child safety from a compliance afterthought to a shared design issue across the Africa. Digital safety is an all-of-society affair – it requires stronger collaboration between government at all levels, technology companies, educators, businesses, philanthropies, civil society and young people to ensure digital platforms are designed with user safety at their core. So, good to see some movement in this direction.
What can Africa’s tech ecosystem do?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the promise of Africa’s tech ecosystem. And I know there’s a wave of investments into tech development on African soil. So, what would I love to see as regards issues like this? Innovative ideas and solutions by Africans closest to the challenges.
Africa needs to turn its fresh, innovative ideas; vibrant youth, strong creative economy and tech ecosystem into an innovation infrastructure that addresses challenges like this. We need more solutions more than pity parties. And I argue that those solutions will be more sustainable if they emerge from Africa and/or by Africans who understand the complexity and uniqueness of the challenges on the continent. The future workforce advantage Africa holds is real. But it will not survive being governed by frameworks built elsewhere, for elsewhere, and exported wholesale here as best practice. Building technology for the African context – e.g. for children learning in underserved communities where digital access is still a challenge, would take into consideration the existing infrastructure and level of awareness in such a community. Perhaps innovation in this context then means products that require low data or that can be used offline.
Profit-centric or human-centric design?
And I know that balancing ethics and profit in design is an ongoing tension which every designer or builder must resolve. While teaching my recent AI Ethics class, I was asked “how can African tech builders optimise for profit while adhering to safe and ethical design principles”? I hope my response helped start the kind of debate this developer and his fellow technologists in Africa need to have about the non-binari-ness of these.
For me, and a few developers I have interacted with, prioritising safety, inclusion, and long-term social value while making a decent profit should not be a herculean task nor a hard choice between profit and societal good; both can and should co-exist. Ultimately, whatever choice a designer makes, they will bear the responsibility for the impact on people and planet.
The future, like our children, is observing us. What we do and build today will determine if we have a healthy digital future for Africa.
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