Former Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has called for stricter regulation of the digital ecosystem to protect children from exploitation.
Osinbajo spoke on Tuesday in Cairo, Egypt, at a session convened during the 16th Annual Conference of the Pan African Lawyers Union (PALU) to deliberate on the proposed Cairo Declaration on Child Rights and Design Accountability in the Digital Age.
The high-level session, titled “Guardrails, Not Gates: Protecting Children in the Digital Age,” was organised by the Justice Research Institute (JRI), in collaboration with the African Alliance for People-Centred Justice (AAPCJ) and with support from Luminate.
The statement was made available to newsmen on Wednesday in Abuja by Mrs Foluso Idumu-Shado, Director of People-Centred Justice at JRI.
Osinbajo, who chaired the session, emphasised the need to move beyond approaches that place the primary responsibility for online safety on children and parents.
“We cannot build digital environments in which the risks are engineered into the product and then expect children and parents to carry the responsibility for managing those risks,” he said.
The former Vice President and professor of law stressed that Africa’s response must be grounded in rights, accountability and innovation.
He said effective regulation should not seek to shut children out of the digital world but ensure that digital platforms are designed with their safety, dignity and development in mind.
“The objective is not to build gates that exclude children from technology.
“It is to establish guardrails that ensure technology works for children rather than exploiting their vulnerabilities,” he said.
Idumu-Shado said the Cairo initiative reflected the need for African policymakers and legal practitioners to move from reacting to digital harms to shaping the rules and standards governing digital design.
“Children in Africa are entering a digital environment largely designed elsewhere.
“We must ensure that African children are not merely protected from the consequences of technology but that their rights and interests are considered in how digital technologies are designed, deployed and regulated.
“A people-centred approach requires us to ask a simple question: does the digital environment serve the best interests of the child?
“If it does not, then the law must require those who design and profit from these systems to change the way they operate,” she said.
The director said the proposed declaration would provide an opportunity for African lawyers, regulators, civil society and technology stakeholders to establish a common continental position.
She added that it would also enable individual countries to develop context-specific legislation and regulation.
Lawyers, judges, regulators, policymakers and child-rights advocates from across Africa attended the programme, which was organised to advance continental standards for children’s digital rights.
The discussions focused on the fundamental question of who should bear responsibility when digital products and artificial intelligence systems designed for children expose them to exploitation, manipulation, harmful content, excessive data collection and other digital risks.
