http://How%20do%20we%20build%20for%20the%20Global%20South?

16.07.25 - Governança e Regulação

How do we build for the Global South?

We live in a world of digital divides. The Global South represents 88 percent of the world’s population and has a higher number of internet users, yet it remains under-served by digital technology. Check out the full article on our website.

por Ava Haidar, Jaqueline Pigatto, Louise Karczeski, Miriam Beatrice Wanjiru

How do we build for the Global South?
We live in a world of digital divides. The Global South represents 88 percent of the world’s population and has a higher number of internet users, yet it remains under-served by digital technology. While digital experiences should be available to all, a sizable portion of people remain offline—particularly in low-income countries, in which only 27 percent of the population is connected to the Internet, compared to 93 percent in high-income countries.

The dominance of the Global North, reflected in higher Internet penetration and greater political and economic power, also means that digital products are still largely shaped by the priorities of wealthier nations. This gap between the Global North and Global South requires us to grapple with the realities of socio-cultural influences, such as linguistic diversity, educational barriers, colonial legacies and their impacts, including low-quality infrastructure and issues of connectivity, which remain key barriers to digital utilization. 

Besides, tech giants from the Global North control critical resources and data in ways that prioritise wealthier countries and contribute to information gaps that hinder public policy development in the Global South, particularly around data protection and governance. This weakens national strategies, leaving many nations vulnerable to digital threats. For example, Mozilla revealed that platforms like TikTok Lite lack essential protections for Global South users, while X closed its offices in Ghana and Brazil in recent years, prioritizing its presence in North America and Europe instead. These practices reveal how corporate decision-making prioritizes wealthier regions, limiting the ability of Global South countries to regulate the spread of misinformation or address the harms caused by digital platforms and services.

Digital rights are not just about what people can access, but also the critical safeguards against external actors in their interactions and transactions in the digital ecosystem. Currently, this is skewed heavily against the Global South. As part of the Global South Alliance, we believe that the digital transformation happening in countries around the world requires urgent collective action to promote digital equity and protect people’s rights.

The importance of meaningful Global South participation

The historical dominance of the Global North has had implications on the global policy landscape: multilateral policy agendas, strategies, and frameworks benefit wealthier, more developed regions. Despite often being labelled as ‘global’, these agendas consistently do not address Global South concerns on data, rights, and policy capability. As a result, Global South countries are excluded from the benefits of digital transformation, becoming instead targets for data mining and collection and outsourced data work, with weak governance guardrails in place.

This exclusion reinforces historical power asymmetries and prevents the realization of digital technologies’ potential for progress on development challenges. Addressing this requires confronting key challenges, particularly the limited availability of high-quality data and the absence of strong data governance strategies in the Global South. Without these foundational elements, transformative technologies like digital public infrastructures (DPI) and artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be developed or deployed equitably. Therefore, it is necessary that these concerns are considered in the global digital policy arena.

This begins with overcoming barriers of participation for Global South actors, something that involves even multistakeholder initiatives: for example, during the discussion on the Global Digital Compact, the UN conducted open consultations. By the time the Global South Alliance submitted its first contribution, we were the first submission from Global South stakeholders. The consultation process, although open, has been criticized for not providing meaningful participation for all stakeholders, which impacted the engagement from a diverse range of actors. Also, the lack of transparency on how inputs were included in the negotiations was a point of concern, particularly considering the inclusion of Global South perspectives.

Although the UN promotes the debate between developed and developing nations, poorer countries face a myriad of challenges around participating in digital policy decision-making spaces, particularly when we consider non-governmental stakeholders. Participation in spaces such as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which helps set the digital agenda, is challenged by financial constraints that hinder engagement in this and other relevant forums, as well as language and cultural barriers, and strenuous visa processes.

In policy and tech development, inequalities should be represented with nuance beyond the most obvious issues of literacy, gaps in gender-equal adoption and inclusion metrics. Major tech companies often shape the tech agenda through a narrow, individualistic lens, frequently neglecting the needs of the Global South. By including people from diverse backgrounds, we may change those lenses.

Take the example of algorithmic racism,  which has implications in facial recognition systems failing to accurately recognize the diversity of the population, leading to discriminatory policing. Unlike digital divides related to access or education, this issue emerges from structural biases embedded in technology itself – biases that persist even when access barriers are overcome. It illustrates how deeper systemic inequalities, such as racial bias in AI training data and law enforcement practices, require more than just improving digital literacy or broadening adoption efforts.

Legitimately global processes would involve opening up governance structures to be more inclusive, ensuring that the voices and needs of marginalized regions are central to decision-making processes, and developing global frameworks that are actually global in representation, not only at face value. The NetMundial+10 Multistakeholder Declaration (which includes the São Paulo Multistakeholder Guidelines), launched in 2024, can serve as a model framework, providing guidelines to make governance processes more inclusive and representative, despite the still-existing challenges faced by a multilateral system.

United action to drive change

Ultimately, resolving these imbalances requires a strong and more unified Global South. By working together to highlight the current and future issues we face around digital development, we can shape discussions rather than having the terms of engagement be dictated to us by wealthier nations. Working together also means we can build data solidarity, a principle that seeks to increase collective control, oversight, and ownership over digital data and resources.

In our case, this refers to collectivizing knowledge, which is fundamental to reducing the asymmetry we have seen dominating conversations around global digital development. At the Global South Alliance, we collectively document research evidence on the state of digital rights in the Global South in a digital library, providing researchers, activists, and policymakers in the Global South access to this crucial data. This repository is designed to inform tech policies that benefit the region’s people and foster knowledge sharing, ensuring a continuous exchange of insights and learning.

Having more than a seat at the table

By collectively challenging inequalities and asymmetries, we can elevate the work of civil society in the Global South and drive more effective participation in the international sphere. This includes influencing processes such as the UN Global Digital Compact. This collective action is essential to create solutions on digital public infrastructure, digital IDs, and artificial intelligence that respond to our needs. Civil society has a great opportunity to push for cooperation and partnership in this perspective, to ensure that society’s approach to data is one that fosters solidarity and promotes social justice. As the old saying goes, “if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.”

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