Digital platforms and services have become central infrastructures shaping public discourse, economic
activity, and democratic processes across many countries. Yet their expansive influence is not always visible to the public or to the regulators tasked with overseeing them. Similarly, regulators across Africa routinely face capacity constraints when enforcing and implementing international digital platform governance standards, whose application may lead to uneven effects in countries with significantly different social, economic and political contexts.
For example, cybersecurity authorities may encounter platform-related issues through scams, threats, blackmail, online abuse, and other digital safety risks. Data protection authorities may need to address profiling, surveillance, automated targeting, and the misuse of personal data. Consumer protection bodies may need to address fraud, deceptive business practices, unfair service terms, and platform-enabled economic harm. Electoral bodies may confront disinformation, political advertising, coordinated manipulation, and other risks to electoral integrity and the right to vote.
Yet, to address these issues effectively, they must also balance freedom of expression and access to information with the rights to privacy, dignity, equality, and protection from discrimination, among others. Platform governance, therefore, requires balancing the protection of expression and access to information with broader obligations relating to safety, privacy,
democratic integrity, and protection from harm.
As digital platforms increasingly affect a broader set of rights, public interests, and regulatory mandates, this toolkit provides resources and technical support to guide regulators as they navigate these complex challenges. The toolkit provides two complementary applications:
- It can be used as a whole-of-government co-ordination instrument to support shared understanding across institutions and identify where mandates, responsibilities, and escalation pathways require clarification.
- It can support authority-specific deep dives, enabling individual regulators or oversight bodies to examine how platform governance issues arise within their own mandate, powers, and operational constraints.
These dual modes of application offer stakeholders an opportunity to examine the impact of digital platforms and, respectively, adjust their governance approaches according to their unique institutional capacity, market size, legal frameworks, and political context.
In doing so, this toolkit is intended to support a regulatory ecosystem that recognises that platform governance is often at the intersection of multiple mandates rather than within a single institutional domain. It recognises that effective governance requires attention to how rights interact in practice, particularly where efforts to address harm may also affect lawful expression, access to information, or civic participation.
