Digital Sovereignty of African Countries: Threats and Ways to Protect Them

The article analyzes the consequences of digitalization of the African continent in the context of technological, economic and political rivalry between the United States and China, and Africa’s growing dependence on external partners. The central issue is data security, the process of using the data is considered by the experts through the concepts of “data colonialism”, “digital colonialism” and “digital sovereignty”. The author notes that, on the one hand, digital technologies can contribute to increased productivity, dynamic growth, structural changes and the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals on the African continent; on the other hand, they create new problems and challenges. It is concluded that the digital sovereignty of the states of the African continent, in addition to technological and economic problems, is hampered by competition in cyberspace of extraregional actors, primarily the United States, China and the EU, in the regulatory and legal field, which is taking on a political and ideological nature. It is extremely difficult to achieve digital sovereignty, understood as the right of states to regulate and exercise control over technologies, services and digital data used on sovereign territory in the current circumstances due to the fact that overcoming of quite a few issues is impossible without investment and participation of Western and Asian digital giants, which, in the context of active competition for Africa, are themselves the cause of them.

Africa, digital colonialism, digital sovereignty, data sovereignty, digital economy, data protection, digital confrontation