Opening of 2025 ID4Africa, Addis Ababa Ethiopia Addis Ababa, Ethiopia - World Privacy Forum is pleased to announce that it is chairing a full day privacy workshop at ID4Africa's 2025 AGM. The extended workshop is in two parts, and is focused on hearing the voices of African data protection authorities ...
ID4Africa celebrates its 10th Annual General Meeting this year in Cape Town, South Africa with a program that pushes against multiple boundaries and achieves a new breadth and greater inclusion of diverse stakeholders. ID4Africa’s AGM is easily the most significant identity conference in the world at this point. There are multiple reasons for this; an important one is that the knowledge content at ID4Africa is not replicated anywhere else. In the past, this knowledge base has been focused primarily around government stakeholders. This year, this roster will now carefully expand to civil society organizations that have been deeply involved with African ID systems to gather additional perspectives and foster cooperative dialogue.
WPF's Pam Dixon will be in Kigali, Rwanda to be the lead instructor on a course on digital identity ecosystems as a lecturer for Carnegie Mellon University, as part of their CEE-TP Courses for IT and policy in the developing world . This course, Identity Ecosystems and Digital Transformation: the ...
The World Privacy Forum is pleased to provide a summary of Executive Director Pam Dixon's work in Nairobi, Kenya at the ID4Africa AGM. Dixon served as the Senior Special Rapporteur for two workshops at the 2023 ID4Africa Annual General Meeting in Nairobi, Kenya 23-25 May.In June, ID4Africa hosted a live ...
The World Privacy Forum is pleased to announce Executive Director Pam Dixon has been invited to serve as the Senior Special Rapporteur for two workshops at the 2023 ID4Africa Annual General Meeting which will take place in Nairobi, Kenya 23-25 May. ID4Africa is regarded as the single most important gathering of identity experts and authorities in the world. The focus of Dixon's rapporteur work will include policy and regulatory challenges for digital identity: the African perspective (Workshop 2), and privacy and data protection in identity systems (Workshop 4)...
Identity is a data-rich resource that acts as a key to connect all levels of emerging digital ecosystems. All forms of ID carry some risk, but digital forms of ID, or “dematerialized ID,” cuts across all sectors and links copious data about individuals, their behaviors, financial status, associates, and potentially even political and religious views. Over time, distinct patterns emerge from the linked data and create new kinds of risks for individuals and groups. As the world becomes increasingly and intensely digitalized, we can expect challenges in the identity space to grow apace unless proactive attention is given to identifying and mitigating the current and future risks.
WPF launched a mini-documentary about problems in identity systems on 17 November, 2021 in collaboration with ID4Africa. Digital identity systems are generally accepted as positive tools for social good. Nevertheless, they can pose several dangers and cause significant concerns. This mini-documentary takes viewers on a tour around the world to ...
Recently, ID4Africa held an extremely compelling and meticulously researched livecast on the issue of gender and identity systems, with good discussions that also touched on privacy in this context. The livecast boasted an excellent roster of experts, all of whom are active work in the field. Each presented well-substantiated, groundtruthed research and insight about the myriad ways that how identity systems mediate gender matter a great deal. The cumulative effect was eye-opening.
The World Privacy Forum is pleased to announce its work on a new project with the Center for Global Development (CGD). This project, Governing Data for Development, is led by CGD, with WPF's Executive Director Pam Dixon as co-chair of the project working group with co-chair and Oxford professor Benno Ndulu, who is also the former Governor of the Central Bank of Tanzania. The project, which has been underway for a year, has produced its first report, which is a scoping report based on interviews with key stakeholders. This blog post, which provides background on the project and links to the first project report, is being jointly posted at WPF and CGD.
Today we are publishing the first of a series of discussion papers regarding face recognition and biometrics. The ideas in this paper will be discussed in the ID4Africa live cast, Spotlight on Face Recognition. Too often, discussions about what to do about the risks of face recognition have lacked the ...
Numerous African countries, having passed new privacy laws during and after the time the GDPR was being negotiated, have broken new ground by advancing privacy thought in new and important ways which stretch past the boundaries of the GDPR and contextualize privacy for African contexts. The COVID-19 crisis represents a major test of some of the new data governance systems.
