Inflection point for Global South
The question isn’t if Africa will connect, but who will write the rules, and whether those will lead to dependency or an equitable digital transition
For three decades, the narrative of the Global South has often been defined by extraction — of raw materials, intellectual capital and political autonomy. Today, that narrative is being overwritten by code. Digital infrastructure is no longer a peripheral utility; it is the new institutional scaffold of the state and a multiplier of sovereignty itself. As we look toward the 2026 BRICS agenda, major emerging economies have an opportunity to fundamentally reshape the architecture of global governance by enhancing collective bargaining in the digital sphere.
The traditional view of broadband or data centers is myopic; they are not mere conduits for WhatsApp or Netflix. In the context of fragile institutional legacy — where colonial borders created artificial states and post-independence patronage systems fractured civil services — digital infrastructure offers a bypass. It is the first time many African citizens have encountered an impersonal, rule-based state.
Consider Rwanda’s Irembo platform. By migrating more than 100 government services, from birth certificates to land registration, to a cloud-based e-government system, the average service delivery time was reduced from weeks to hours. But the true governance dividend was anti-fraud. When a land title is a hash on a distributed ledger rather than a paper file in a district commissioner’s drawer, the channels for rent-seeking disappear. For the 2026 BRICS agenda, this is the model: automated transparency.
China’s investments in the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia’s digital backbone — enabled by Huawei’s cloud infrastructure — illustrate both the tension and the triumph. The $600 million project helped move 40 million rural customers into the formal financial grid, allowing the government to disburse food subsidies directly via biometric authentication. Governance capacity surged not because Ethiopian bureaucrats became nobler, but because the system precluded the siphoning of funds.
The upcoming BRICS Summit, tentatively focused on equitable digital transition, finds BRICS at a strategic inflection point. The question is not whether Africa will connect, but who will write the rules of that connection — and whether those rules will enable self-determination or recreate dependency under new labels. For the Global South, digital inclusion without digital agency is simply a faster form of subordination. If BRICS treats connectivity as a gift rather than a governed common, it will replicate the very hierarchies it claims to oppose.
Specifically, the 2026 BRICS agenda must prioritize the bargaining chips, including norms, financing instruments and technical standards that can anchor sovereignty in practice. First, data localization should be secured as a right, not a barrier. The West frames data sovereignty as protectionism. For the Global South, it is survival. BRICS should push for a treaty recognizing that public interest data (health, land, identity) generated within a developing economy is a strategic asset. The 2026 agenda could adopt the “Kigali Principles” drafted in 2022 from ongoing African Union discourse, mandating that all government-procured cloud services must process high-sensitivity data within the continent of origin, using local encryption keys held by an independent judicial authority.
Open-source e-government stacks should be further standardized. Currently, an estimated 70 percent of African e-government platforms are built on proprietary Western codebases, locking states into perpetual licensing and vendor dependency. BRICS’ New Development Bank should fund a repository of a shared, secure, auditable stack for civil registration, taxation and logistics. This would transform governance capacity from a national procurement exercise into South-South commons.
The 2026 BRICS agenda must mature past infantile debates to build a resilience audit framework. Sustainability is not merely environmental. In the digital realm, it is the ability to update, audit and abandon a system without external permission. Too many African states have been gifted “free” digital infrastructure that becomes a permanent annuity for the donor nation’s tech firms. The 2026 agenda must prioritize technology transfer with teeth: local manufacturing of routers, training of professional local system administrators, and a BRICS-supported certification body for digital sovereignty auditors.
As the world gears up for the 2026 BRICS Summit, the Global South holds a singular advantage: it is not yet locked into legacy digital systems. Unlike London or New York, Nairobi can build a state from the cloud up. But this window is closing. The BRICS has to act swiftly and effectively to coordinate on digital standards, financing and sovereignty protections.
The 2026 BRICS Summit must answer a single, piercing question: will digital infrastructure serve as a vector for development or a vector for dependency? The answer lies not in the speed of the fiber, but in the integrity of the governance framework that regulates it — and in whether BRICS is prepared to treat digital sovereignty not as an afterthought, but as the core business of a just, multipolar order. For the first time in four centuries, the periphery has the code. It must resist the temptation to merely paste it.
The author is the chairman of the Department of Diplomacy & International Studies at the University of Nairobi, and the chair of the Foreign Service Academy, Kenya.
The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.
