[digital.global] im Dialog

A key objective of this session is to discuss the urgent need to enhance the sustainability of the digital sector and leverage digital innovations for climate action. The session will present newly developed the Green Data Centre investment guidelines developed jointly by the World Bank and ITU with the support from the BMZ/GIZ Global Digital Transformation program. Furthermore, the session will include a panel to discuss the opportunities and challenges to enhance investments in sustainable digital and green infrastructure.

Specific objectives include

• Share the guide’s findings and initiate a debate on the enablers, barriers, and quality aspects of promoting green data centres in Africa and beyond.
• Create awareness about the report’s findings and highlight the importance of adopting environmentally sustainable practices in the data centre industry
• Engaging stakeholders from various sectors, including government representatives, industry experts, and environmental organizations, the discussion

Speakers: John Tanui Permanent Secretary, MoICT, Kenya, Golestan Rawan, Chief Digital Technology Officer, UNEP, Thelma Quaye, Director of Digital Infrastructure, Smart Africa, Bodo Immink, Country Director, GIZ Kenya, Sara Ballan, Senior Digital Specialist, World Bank, Dan Kwach, MD East Africa for Africa Data Centers Association, Nkem Onwuamgegbu, Africa Director MIGA, Lucas Amollo, Manager, ICT and Smart City Solutions, KONZA, Osman Issah, Manager, Resilient and Inclusive Digital Infrastructure, Smart Africa, Aida Ndiaye, Senior Digital Program Leader, East Africa, AFD

Livestream

This official side event of the Kenyan government is hosted by the Permanent Secretary, MoICT.

The main objective of the round is to bring together partner countries (Kenya, South Africa), the EU, Development Finance institutions (World Bank, EIB, AFDB) and international donors (BMZ, MFA Finland) to discuss opportunities, mechanisms, and challenges on how to accelerate investments into sustainable and secure data and digital infrastructure in Africa bases on the European Union’s Global Gateway Strategy. A specific objective is to seek alignment amongst key stakeholders such as African governments, public and private project promoters, and Development Finance Institutions to foster impact-driven investments in trusted and sustainable data and digital infrastructure in Africa.

The panel will address these key issues:

• What are the main reasons for the current underinvestment in sustainable digital infrastructure like data centres in the Africa region?
• What role do government regulations and incentives play in boosting investments into green and secure data infrastructure to support local economic and social development?
• What opportunities and risks do green and secure data centres offer for sustainable development and technology adoption in Africa?
• How can International and European Development Finance Institutions collaborate on co-investment programs that share risks and pool funding for achieving increased impact?
• How can the European Fund for Sustainable Development Plus (EFSD+) and other financing mechanisms be leveraged to attract private investments for green and secure data centre projects?
• What steps can enhance the access to finance for infrastructure promoters in the region?
• How can African partners leverage technical cooperation with international partners?
• How shall capacity building initiatives be designed to support the growth of local stakeholders and a workforce with expertise in green and secure data centre regulations and technologies?

Moderation: Thelma Quaye, Director of Digital Infrastructure, Smart Africa

Speakers: Dr. Heike Hamgart, Managing Director EBRD, Pasi Hellman, Under-Secretary of State, MFA Finland, Wendy Hughes, Senior Regional Director, Infrastructure Department, Africa World Bank, Carla Montesi, Director, Twin Transition, DG INTPA, John Tanui Permanent Secretary, MoICT, Kenya, Nicolas Williams, Director Digital Infrastructure, AFDB, Christian Elias, Head of Unit Public Sector, East Africa and Southern Africa EIB, Philipp Knill, BMZ

The event will include a panel discussion, bringing together leading experts from the digital and green spheres, to explore the unique role of local digital innovations in advancing climate action. The event will also involve the announcement of the Digital and Green Innovation (DGIx), an acceleration programme that aims to identify, refine, and scale unique solutions that leverage digital transformation and local expertise in tackling pressing climate challenges. Find out more about the DGIx programme by attending our event on site or online.

Speakers:

• Alessandra Sgobbi, Head of Unit for Climate Finance in DG CLIMA
• Amel Makhlouf UN/EU International Expert, Climate, Climate Finance, Sustainable Development
• Taha Bawa CEO & Co-founder of Goodwall
• Fatou Jeng Youth Climate Advisor to the United Nations Secretary General (YAG)
• Sheilah Birgen Entrepreneur and Ecosystem and Community Builder

Moderation: Kudzai Mubaiwa Board Treasurer – AfriLabs

The onsite and online access to the event is free of charge.

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The Tallinn Digital Summit 2023 took place on 05 September at the Tallinn Creative Hub, both on-site and digitally. The event was organised by Prime Minister Kaja Kallas with the participation of the Ministry of Economy and Communications, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Government Office of Estonia. Under the motto “Refreshing the agenda of democracy and technology”, the aim of the summit was to facilitate an exchange between leading actors in the digital world on the opportunities and challenges of digitalisation for resilient, responsive and open governance. In total, representatives from over 70 countries – including eight heads of state and government as well as EU Commissioner Thierry Breton – took part. A special focus was on the digital transformation of the public sector and the potential of digital public infrastructure (DPI) and goods (DPG), involving business, academia and civil society. Against this background, the Tallinn Digital Summit was a key forum and partner meeting for the GovStack initiative in particular. The BMZ and German development cooperation were represented in three sessions and eight bilateral and multilateral meetings on site.

Katharina Mänz, Deputy Head of the Digitalisation Unit at BMZ, moderated the GovStack Side Event Panel “Global momentum fpr DPI and DPG in digital cooperation”, which presented the current era of growing interest in digital public infrastructure and digital public goods. Christopher Burns, Chief Digital Development Officer and Director for Technology, USAID and Hoa-Binh Adjemian, Deputy Head of Unit – “An economy that works for people, green, digital and connected”, DG NEAR participated.

Following the panel, the first cohort of the GovStack Women in GovTech Challenge was welcomed. For this feminist digital policy joint action, 215 women from digital government worldwide have applied to participate since the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) 2023. The best projects will be presented at WSIS 2024.

Katharina Mänz presented the initiative together with Nele Leosk, Assistant Ambassador for Digital Affairs, Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Doreen Bogdan-Martin (ITU).

The panel was moderated by Yolanda Martinez (ITU).

The DIPC project, in collaboration with its implementing partner Digital Square, partnered with the Ghana Health Service (GHS) to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the existing systems and workflows within Ghana’s immunization health sector. This included a multifaceted approach, including a desk review, consultations with ministry officials, and an inclusive online survey covering all 16 regions of the country. The exercise also included input from end users, particularly regional health managers, who highlighted the need for enhanced features and interventions. Notably, data exchange among systems emerged as the most commonly requested improvement during this ecosystem mapping initiative.

In February, officials from the Malawi Ministry of Health Digital Health Unit held a meeting with members of DIPC project to inaugurate the project in Malawi. DIPC intends to develop a better and enduring pandemic-prepared health systems by enhancing the immunization workflows. The DIPC project works closely with the Malawi´s Digital Health Unit to create documentation to support the country better understand the tools best designed to exchange data to meet their needs in the immunization health domain and aligning activities with the Digital Health Strategy of Malawi.

The Data Ecosystem Mapping workshop aimed to bring together various stakeholders from the public and private sectors in Peru, with the collaboration of the Ministry of Health (MINSA), the Data4Policy initiative, and GIZ’s Digital Innovation in Pandemic Control (DIPC), in partnership with the Open Data Institute (ODI). During the event, successful experiences of Data4Policy in the health context were shared, and it was analyzed how the ODI could contribute to strengthening the health data ecosystem in Peru. Through group work sessions, the participants identified areas for improvement and proposed concrete recommendations to optimize the distribution of vaccines in the country. The result was a collaboration that laid the foundations for improving vaccine delivery and promoting data sharing in the process.

The process of gathering information to understand the different systems within the digital health landscape used to support immunization services initiated. Different stakeholders came together to collect and analyze relevant information and support the system selection within the project. The agreement was made thereafter to support the immunization system known as TiMR, which is being used by Ministry of Health (MoH). The system’s current gaps were subsequently addressed in a workshop held in Arusha. After the workshop to validate the system requirement as provided by MoH and to localize the immunization Digital Adaptation Kit (DAK), the plan has been submitted to the MoH and awaits approval.

The Digital Learning Week is the rebranding of the decade-long UNESCO Mobile Learning Week and will serve as the new UNESCO annual flagship event on digital learning to steer the human-centred digital transformation of education. It aims to convene in-person events to reassemble the global community of policy-makers, practitioners, educators, private sector partners, researchers and development agencies to jointly respond to the new dynamic around digital learning.

The inaugural edition of Digital Learning Week will look closely at public digital learning platforms and generative AI, examining how both can be steered to reinforce and enrich humanistic education.

atingi, the digital learning platform of the BMZ, will be presented in the breakout session 3.2 “Promoting inclusion and gender equality in the use of platforms for education” with the lecture “Empowering marginalized communities through inclusive EdTech for public good”. atingi will present implemented inclusive EdTech initiatives such as the atingi IVR solution in Benin and the Fempreneurship project in Togo.

The event will take place in-person at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France. To ensure maximum reach and inclusivity, the plenary sessions, panel discussions and public lecture will be livestreamed, and interpretation will be provided in English and French. Please note that the atingi session will not be livestreamed.

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G20 Digital Ministers met on 19 August 2023, at Bengaluru, India and released a joint outcome document as the culmination point of four previous Working Group Meetings and many months of exchange between country delegates. In the joint outcome document the Ministers highlighted the great potential that foundational digital systems such as for identification of citizens or payments have especially for low- and middle-income countries. They committed to principles that such systems that will shape entire societies should be governed in a way that promotes inclusion and competition and individual empowerment. They also stressed the value of sharing existing systems and experiences between countries.

Finally, they highlighted the importance of coordinated action to support low-income countries in taking advantages of these important technologies in their fight for poverty reduction and shared prosperity.

Limits and opportunities of competition law in protecting gig workers – part five of the Policy Roundtable Series.

Our Gig Economy Initiative hosted another event in the Gig Economy Webinar Series. The fifth roundtable on July 26 focused on the intersection of antitrust laws and digital labor platforms on the African continent.

Concerns about working conditions on digital labor platforms have recently led to numerous protests, while the increasing market dominance of certain platforms results in economic dependency of workers that makes them vulnerable to exploitation. If the rapid growth of these digital labor platforms initially presents opportunities for the continent, the question is what impact this will have on future innovation, market entry, and access to good jobs in the African market in the absence of regulation.

The event brought together experts from across the continent to explore the characteristics of the existing digital labor platform market, the impact of the dominant platform players , and the competitive challenges posed by the current system.

Speakers:

• Maria-José Schmidt-Kessen, Assistant Professor, CEU
• Bonnita Nyamwire, Head of Research, Pollicy Uganda
• Florence Abebe, Chief Legal Officer, Federal Competition
  & Consumer Protection Commission Authority Nigeria

Moderator:

• Vellah Kigwiru, Doctoral Fellow, Hochschule für Politik, TUM

The event served as a valuable complement to the competition module authored by Vellah Kigwiru, which is part of our comprehensive 8-module online course, The Rise and Economics of Digital Labor Platforms, on the rise and economics of digital labor platforms.

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As part of the atingi ecosystem, the atingi4Ag project in Benin developed an open-source Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solution to make digital learning more accessible and inclusive. Working with three local farmers’ associations, the Benin Ministry of Digitalization, and the Benin Ministry of Agriculture, the team developed a training solution to deliver learning content to 90,000 farmers and small businesses, accessible through basic cell phones or smartphones. In addition to developing the technical solution, the project partnered with local telecommunications provider Moov Africa to provide SIM cards and discounted rates for calls to the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) courses. The IVR learning campaign was launched and handed over to partners on July 21, 2023 at the Moov Africa conference room in Cotonou, Benin.

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On July 20, the Fairwork report: “Work in the Planetary Labour Market: Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings 2023” was released. The study evaluates and grades basic fairness standards in labor agreements on 15 web-based digital labour platforms according to the five Fairwork principles:
Fair pay, conditions, contracts, management, and representation.

This year’s scores show that platforms are still far from safeguarding the basic standards of fair work expressed in these five principles. The research has revealed the precarious conditions for workers active in microwork platforms that provide services such as data annotation and labelling, video scoring and model evaluation to artificial intelligence (AI) companies. While the run for AI deployments gets public hype and momentum, workers behind the design, building and testing of these technological solutions, unfortunately, still face enormous challenges and experience unfair working conditions.

The launch event explored the key findings of the report in more depth, highlighted the implications for workers and the digital economy, and discussed the way forward to achieve minimum standards for fair work in the platform-based labor market. Prof. Mark Graham, Director of Fairwork and the lead researcher of the report, Dr. Jonas Valente presented the key findings.

Speakers:

• Dr Janine Berg, Senior Economist, International Labour Organization
• Esther Gathigi-Kibugi, Country Director, DOT Kenya

The full report can be viewed here.

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In the workshop, representatives of the BMZ, BMAS and BMWK developed a joint narrative on the priority areas of sustainability/transformation and health. The goals of the workshop were networking and exchange among those responsible for the measures as well as the identification of cooperation potentials.

The third EU-CELAC Summit took place in Brussels on July 17 and 18, 2023. Under the motto “Renewing the bi-regional partnership to strengthen peace and sustainable development”, the summit brought together heads of state and government from Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean to renew and strengthen relations between the two regions.

In preparation, the EU-LAC International Foundation was organizing several thematic EU-LAC forums aimed at bringing together relevant social actors, policy makers and institutions to discuss challenges and opportunities for the strategic partnership between the EU and Latin America/Caribbean.

On July 14, a virtual panel discussion on Twin Transition in Latin America and the Caribbean – Youth and Women’s Perspectives on Green and Digital Transformation was held in advance of the Summit.

Panel Discussion has included:

• Insight into the perspectives of women and youth on inclusion in the digital green transformation.
• Appreciation of the commitment of the EU and partners in EU member states to collaborate and use digital innovation to address global challenges, including the climate crisis
• Opportunity for innovators from the Latin American and Caribbean region, especially women, youth, and marginalized communities, to present their idea at an international competition and receive support for its implementation, in the region and globally.
• Focusing on women, youth and marginalized communities, innovators* from Latin America and the Caribbean will be offered the opportunity to present their ideas for an international competition, gaining support for potential scale-up at regional and global levels.