Paradigm Initiative Londa Digital Rights and Inclusion in Africa annual reporting campaign (2020-ongoing)

This is Paradigm Initiative's sustained annual continent-scale monitoring and reporting campaign on the state of digital rights and digital inclusion in Africa, anchored by the Londa Digital Rights and Inclusion in Africa report published every year from 2020 to the present. Londa — a title of Zulu origin calling for action to protect or defend — is the corpus's principal recurring pan-African civil-society state-of-the-field publication on internet freedom, privacy, surveillance, biometric and data-protection regulation, AI governance, digital ID, online gender-based violence, and digital inclusion. Each annual edition is produced by a network of African digital-rights expert chapter authors recruited through public Call for Researchers cycles, published in English and French (with a Swahili edition for the founding 2020 report), and accompanied by a series of stand-alone country-specific report PDFs. The campaign has expanded its country footprint from 20 countries in 2020 to 27 countries in 2024 and 2025, and now anchors a separate sub-instrument — the Londa Score Index — designed as a year-on-year benchmarking tool civil-society actors can route into the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR) as the basis of periodic shadow reports under Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights.

The 2020 founding edition

The first consolidated Londa edition was published in the second half of 2020, covering twenty African countries and explicitly built around the digital-divide question worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic and around infractions on privacy, access to information, and freedom of expression observed across the continent during the same year. The edition was released simultaneously in English, French, and Swahili — the trilingual reach a deliberate signal of the report's intention to reach African civil-society audiences across the continent's principal language regions rather than only the Anglophone field that anchored its publishing organisation. The 2020 report set the methodological template the campaign has carried forward: an editorial structure under which a per-country chapter by a national digital-rights expert is paired with a consolidated cross-cutting analysis written from the Londa editorial frame, and a parallel series of stand-alone country-report PDFs that national civil-society actors can use independently of the consolidated edition.

The advocacy follow-on to Londa 2020 was a Digi-Talks with Focus 10-country tour running from 15 February to 7 March 2022 — Cameroon, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia — using Paradigm Initiative's short film Focus as the visual companion to the 2020 report and converting it into a sequence of national civil-society dialogues. The tour, described in the Nigerian press as the report's continental advocacy arm, gave the Londa campaign its operational shape: an annual evidentiary publication followed by an extended in-country advocacy pass on the published findings.

Annual cadence and editorial expansion

The Londa publishing cycle now runs on an annual launch paired with the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF) as the convening venue at which each new edition is released. Londa 2022 — the 24-country edition — was launched at the tenth-edition DRIF23 in Nairobi, Kenya in April 2023, co-hosted by Paradigm Initiative with Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet) and the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (CIPIT) at Strathmore University. Londa 2023 — the 26-country edition — was launched at the eleventh-edition DRIF24 in Accra, Ghana in April 2024 by PIN's Senior Manager, Partnerships and Engagement, Thobekile Matimbe, alongside the launch of the Ayeta digital-rights advocacy toolkit and the RIPOTI incident-reporting platform. Londa 2024 — the 27-country edition — was launched at DRIF25 at the Mulungushi International Conference Centre in Lusaka, Zambia from 29 April to 1 May 2025 with over 1,300 participants from 65 countries registered. Londa 2025 — also covering 27 countries — was launched at DRIF26 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire in April 2026 with country partner Coalition Ivoirienne des Défenseurs des Droits Humains.

Each annual edition is structured around a recurring set of cross-cutting themes — internet access and disruptions, online freedom of expression, privacy and surveillance, gendered disinformation, data protection and cyber security, digital IDs, digital inclusion, the Universal Service Fund, and developments in ICT and emerging technologies — within which each country chapter assesses its national year. The thematic register has expanded across editions: AI-and-emerging-technologies and online gender-based violence have become first-class thematic categories in the post-2023 editions, and the Londa 2024 and 2025 editions have foregrounded high data costs, gender inequality, and the absence of legal frameworks against online gender-based violence as cross-cutting concerns alongside the long-running freedom-of-expression and shutdowns registers.

The Londa Score Index

The Londa Score Index was introduced in the Londa 2024 edition as the campaign's measurement instrument and the principal new analytical move of the post-2023 phase of the Londa arc. The index evaluates each covered country across twelve indicators — internet shutdowns; laws and policies on internet access; false-news criminalisation; sedition legislation; arbitrary arrests of media, human-rights defenders, and citizens; data-protection legislation; content removal without due process; invasion of privacy in communications; government transparency on digital technologies; AI and emerging-technologies strategies; child online safety laws and policies; and digital inclusion measures — on a 1-5 scale per indicator (1 = totally non-compliant; 2 = mildly compliant; 3 = moderately compliant; 4 = considerably compliant; 5 = fully compliant), producing a 60-point maximum national score that is benchmarked against the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information. The express civil-society use of the resulting score is to inform the ACHPR on a country's performance regarding compliance with Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights in periodic shadow reports — making Londa an explicit pan-African civil-society advocacy infrastructure feeding into the continent's principal regional human-rights mechanism on freedom of expression and access to information.

The Londa 2024 index — the first published ranking — placed South Africa, Ghana, Zambia, Namibia, Rwanda, Nigeria, Senegal, Malawi, Tunisia, and Kenya as the top-ten compliant countries. The Londa 2025 index revised the top-ten ranking to South Africa, Ghana, Namibia, Senegal, Egypt, Zambia, Kenya, Rwanda, Malawi, and Nigeria — with Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan named at the bottom of the index. The year-on-year movement — Nigeria sliding down the rankings between the two editions, picked up in Nigerian national press as a domestic civil-society advocacy moment — illustrates the function the Score Index was designed for: a measurable inter-temporal national-comparison instrument the Londa network of country authors can use to anchor in-country advocacy on policy-direction questions for the year ahead.

Findings, reception, and downstream use

Londa 2024's headline finding on internet disruptions — a marked increase across Comoros, The Gambia, Kenya, Mauritius, and Mozambique, with The Gambian disruption attributed to undersea-cable failure and the other four to government-imposed shutdowns — has anchored the African civil-society shutdowns register through 2025 and 2026 and feeds directly into the #KeepItOn coalition reporting on which Paradigm Initiative is also a founding member organisation. 'Gbenga Sesan's Londa 2025 launch statement — that "a society is only as strong as how it treats its weakest members" and that in the area of inclusion "we must acknowledge that many have been left behind" — has framed the inclusion-and-vulnerability register of the post-Score-Index phase, paired with the technical Score Index findings to make the campaign's annual launch as much a normative civil-society statement on the continent's digital-rights direction as a technical national-ranking exercise.

Londa country chapters are routinely republished or summarised by national civil-society networks (KICTANet in Kenya, Digital Shelter in Somalia) and received in national press across the reported countries — Cameroon's Guardian Post framing the Cameroon country chapter into pre-electoral digital-rights advocacy, Kenya's Techish and Hapakenya outlets carrying the Kenyan findings, Nigeria's ThisDay Live carrying the national-ranking story, and ITEdge News carrying the continental-level analytical findings on launch day. The cumulative effect of six years of annual launches paired with continent-wide republication is that Londa has become, in the corpus's terms, the African civil-society field's principal year-on-year evidentiary anchor on digital rights — the artefact African policy and movement actors point to when they need a single comparable cross-country reading of where the continent stood in any given year.

Significance for the broader AI-good movement

The Londa campaign is the corpus's principal sustained pan-African civil-society reporting and advocacy infrastructure on digital rights, internet freedom, and the AI-and-human-rights register at the continent scale. Where individual African digital-rights organisations track national developments and where global tracking projects produced from outside the continent take the African field as one register among many, Londa is the campaign that operates at the scale of the continent it is reporting on — assembling a network of African digital-rights expert chapter authors each year, producing a 27-country evidentiary record in two working languages with stand-alone country PDFs, and routing the resulting Score Index findings into the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights as a civil-society shadow-reporting input. The campaign's structural position complements the East African (KICTANet, CIPIT) and Southern African organisational coverage the corpus already carries and the West African anchoring Paradigm Initiative itself supplies, and supplies the make-AI-good movement with its principal year-on-year continental reading on where the African civil-society field judges the digital-rights conditions of AI deployment, surveillance, content moderation, biometric ID, and online gender-based violence to stand.