Description:

Digital government initiatives are increasingly critical to public service delivery and civic engagement. When done well, they can foster greater efficiency and inclusion, reduce corruption and fraud, and serve as a pathway to attaining several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). When they fail to include privacy, data security and transparency as core values and features, they can entrench power and knowledge asymmetries, and expose citizens, especially vulnerable and marginalized groups, to grave harm. This session reviews the proliferation of such public digital infrastructure, particularly in the Global South, and examines the policy instruments and technical safeguards that preserve the privacy of citizens’ data within large e-government platforms and portals. Through the use of vivid, real world examples from emerging economies, serving as grounded case studies and provocations, this session will encourage participants to engage with the life-cycle of data within e-governance initiatives, the processes and stakeholders that can safeguard its privacy and integrity, and offer concrete recommendations for governance reform. The session will include a multi stakeholder role-playing exercise with a specially designed card game, to help bring the issues to life and increase literacy and understanding.