A Civil Society Organisation, Accountability Lab Nigeria, has taken the centre stage in driving awareness campaigns and seeking innovative solutions for favourable digital governance in protection of the digital and data privacy of Nigerians who use different internet-based platforms for their business and social engagements.
The organisation says it is driving the process to push government and stakeholders in the digital governance space to come up with effective protection for the teeming population of Nigeria who are already at risk of being victims of all kinds of data or privacy violations, through personal data they made available in the digital platforms they use.
It added that it also intends to drive a precautionary awareness campaign to enable Nigerians to know their digital rights and risks in the usage of digital platforms and space.
Speaking at a one-day digital rights innovation lab meeting in Abuja, Country Director, Accountability Lab Nigeria, Friday Odeh, admonished the government to uphold the total rights and privacy of citizens.
The one-day digital rights innovation lab meeting was organised by Accountability Lab Nigeria in partnership with Spaces for Change, National Data Protection Commission, Paradigm Initiative Nigeria, and National Endowment for Democracy.
Odeh said: “We work in the digital governance space to ensure that we build the capacity of government officials and also help citizens understand their role in making digital governance work. The basic background for this event today is on how the Accountability Lab knowledge program can support the digital rights Innovation Lab, which is basically a platform to discuss issues around digital rights and data privacy and protection as the case may be.
“In recent times, we’ve seen what has happened during the elections and how misinformation or disinformation has taken the stage. So the provoking question is; all these are digital platforms and digital tools which citizens engage with, how do we begin to manage information to ensure we have the right information being passed to citizens? How do we help the citizens understand how their rights are protected on these platforms while they use them to communicate and converse with their fellow citizens and share information?
“In this day and time, we need access to information. However, we also have to think about the challenges that have to do with content, which go on digital platforms, which causes disunity in some contexts, and causes hate speech in some contexts. We need to create a balance.
“So we are bringing this platform together with government officials, civil society organizations working on digital rights and data protection, to see how we can form collaborative or collective actions to understand how we can provide solutions and collectively agree.
“One of the key things that has happened within the Nigeria system is also to speed up citizens driven policy mechanism where citizens feedback into this conversation to understand that they are drivers of policies, they are drivers of monitoring of policies, they are drivers of implementing policies. As we need our voices to be heard and how the strategies we want to develop through this platform will help solve some of the issues around digital rights and data protection.”
The Programme Officer, Accountability Lab Nigeria, Mnenga Shiiwua, said: “We’re looking for innovative ways to sensitize the people and create a collaborative approach towards pushing the understanding of the Nigerian Data Protection Act to the citizens to engage the relevant stakeholders, those from the civil society organisations and the government side, to see how together we can ensure first the awareness of the Act is deepened, and secondly to see how together we can protect the rights of the citizens.
“This is important because if there are no awareness on the protection of rights, the tendency to violate them is very high and this is particular in terms of the digital rights Protection Act, which was passed recently. So there is a need to engage in it to ensure that the security agencies comply with the provisions of the Act and ensure the rights of the citizens are protected, as well as making citizens understand what actually constitutes their data because that is the starting point.”
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