Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum 22 (DRIF22), 9th edition (hybrid with Lagos in-person, April–May 2022)

From Tuesday 12 to Thursday 14 April 2022, Paradigm Initiative convened the ninth edition of the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF22) as a three-day virtual programme, followed by in-person country sessions across 17 African countries through late April and May — including Lagos, Nigeria on 27–28 April 2022 — under the theme "Towards a Digitally Inclusive and Rights-Respecting Africa". The 9th edition drew more than 500 online participants, closed with a Media Parley in Nairobi on 20 May 2022 at which Paradigm Initiative launched the Londa 2022 digital-rights-in-Africa report, and — through the Lagos and sixteen other country-session footprints — returned the Forum to the city and country where it was first convened as the Internet Freedom Forum in September 2013.

Context

The Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum is Paradigm Initiative's signature continent-wide convening on digital rights, internet freedom, and digital inclusion, running annually since the first Internet Freedom Forum in Lagos on 20 September 2013. The 9th edition's hybrid structure — a central virtual programme followed by distributed in-person country sessions — was a continuation of the COVID-era format that Paradigm Initiative had adopted to keep the Forum running through the pandemic years, and extended the in-person country-session footprint from the twelve countries reached in the prior edition to seventeen, distributing the Forum's civil-society convening across a wider national footprint while keeping the central programme virtual and continent-accessible.

Nigeria — and Lagos specifically — carried particular structural significance for the 9th edition. Paradigm Initiative is headquartered in Lagos, where Gbenga Sesan founded the organisation in 2007; the Forum began as the Internet Freedom Forum in Lagos in September and December 2013 and held its early editions in Abuja and Lagos before expanding to Nairobi and other regional capitals. The Lagos in-person sessions on 27–28 April were therefore a return of the Forum to its institutional home, convened alongside Nigerian civil-society co-hosts — TechHer, Keeping It Real Foundation (KIR), Africa-China Reporting Project (ACRP), and Stand to End Rape Initiative (STER) — and placed the Forum's Nigeria anchor inside dedicated sessions on data journalism and digital identity in Africa.

The Wikimedia Foundation's Global Advocacy and Public Policy team acted as a named sponsor, underwriting internet-access costs for 372 registered participants for the virtual sessions — an access mechanism ensuring that connectivity constraints did not exclude participants from the continent's lower-connectivity regions from a virtual-first Forum format.

What happened

DRIF22's virtual phase opened with a plenary in which Commissioner Lawrence Murugu Mute — Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Africa at the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights — delivered the keynote address. Gbenga Sesan, Emma Inamutila Theofelus (Deputy Minister of ICT, Namibia), and Prosper Ntetika Mbakala (representing the Congolese Digital Minister) participated in the opening programme, positioning the Forum inside the governmental-civil-society interface on digital policy at the pan-African and national levels.

The thematic programme across virtual and country sessions spanned eight areas: data privacy and data rights; affordable internet access; gender and ICTs, including sexual and gender-based violence online; disability rights and ICT inclusion; health surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic; internet shutdowns; freedom of expression and civil-society activism online; and African-language visibility and media freedoms on the internet. Thirteen virtual sessions were co-hosted with organisations across the continent — Uhuru Tech Solution, Youth Hub Africa, Human Rights Journalists Network, BONews Service, Media Defence, Usmanu Danfodiyo University–Sokoto, Community Voices Zimbabwe, AfriMITI, Mozilla Foundation, Uzalendo Afrika Initiative, NamTshuwe Digital, Africa Internet Rights Alliance (AIRA), TechHer, Keeping It Real Foundation, and Stand to End Rape Initiative — distributing the Forum's programming production across a multi-organisation African civil-society network rather than concentrating it within Paradigm Initiative alone.

The Lagos in-person sessions (27–28 April) brought together Nigerian civil-society participants for sessions including the ACRP-co-hosted session on journalists' investigations and their impact on digital identity, data, and technology in Africa, featuring Bongiwe Tutu of the Africa-China Reporting Project alongside Michelle Agoh, Ifedayo Ogunyemi, Temitope Obayendo, and Tunde Omolehin. The Africa-China Reporting Project used the Lagos sessions to launch a book compiling journalists' investigations into digital identity and data practices across the continent — using the Forum as the publication venue for an editorial output directly tied to the session's investigative journalism theme and anchoring a data-journalism thread inside the wider digital-rights convening frame.

Two programme launches marked the Forum's close. At the country sessions, Paradigm Initiative launched the LIFE Legacy programme — scaling its LIFE digital-inclusion curriculum across pan-African partner organisations, with an initial cohort including Mentor an African Child Initiative (MACI), Startup Kebbi, SureAid Development Initiative, Vision Alive Foundation, DigiCon Academy, Koneta Hub, and Asikana Network — positioning DRIF22 as both a digital-rights convening and a digital-inclusion programme-launch venue. At the closing Media Parley in Nairobi on 20 May 2022, Paradigm Initiative officially launched the Londa 2022 report, its annual state-of-digital-rights-and-inclusion-in-Africa publication covering 22 African countries, placing the report launch inside the Forum's convening arc as the anchor public output of the DRIF22 cycle.

Significance

DRIF22 is the corpus's first Event located in Nigeria, the first Event in West Africa, and the first Event in the DRIF series entered from the Forum's origin country. The Lagos sessions close the Nigeria/West Africa event geo gap — the corpus had Paradigm Initiative present as an organisational anchor but no Event entry for any DRIF edition held in the organisation's home country or home city, despite Nigeria being the Forum's founding context and Lagos the headquarters from which the continental network was built.

Inside the DRIF series' arc, DRIF22 sits at a formative phase: the 9th edition operating in a COVID-adapted hybrid format, with a 17-country footprint larger than the prior edition's 12-country reach, demonstrating that the pan-African convening cadence was expanding rather than contracting through the pandemic period. The tenth edition in Nairobi in 2023 and the thirteenth edition in Abidjan in 2026 — the corpus's first Francophone-Africa DRIF entry — build on the series cadence that the 9th edition sustained. The 500+ online participants and 17-country in-person footprint, sized against the 13th edition's 800+ Abidjan registration, supply the corpus with a reference point inside the DRIF series' growth trajectory across the period when it was transitioning from hybrid post-COVID formats back toward the pan-African in-person convening model.

The Lagos sessions' placement inside Nigeria's civil-society media-freedom and data-journalism register — with the ACRP book launch and the digital-identity-and-data-technology investigative-journalism session as the thematic anchor for the in-person day — marks this entry as the corpus's first Event at the intersection of Nigerian civil-society digital-rights organising and African data-journalism practice, a thread distinct from the platform-accountability, internet-shutdown, and biometric-surveillance threads the corpus's other DRIF and Paradigm Initiative entries have surfaced.