Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum 26 (DRIF26), Abidjan (14-16 April 2026)

From Tuesday 14 to Thursday 16 April 2026, Paradigm Initiative convened the thirteenth edition of its annual Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum at the Radisson Blu Abidjan Airport Hotel in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire — the first DRIF held in a Francophone African country and the largest single pan-African civil-society convening on digital rights, digital inclusion, and AI policy of any kind in the corpus's frame, with more than 800 participants registered ahead of opening day from across the continent and beyond. Convened with country partner Coalition Ivoirienne des Défenseurs des Droits Humains (CIDDH) under the theme "Building Inclusive and Resilient Digital Futures", DRIF26 was structured around six thematic tracks — Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies; Trust and Accountability; Data Protection, Privacy and Cybersecurity; Digital Inclusion and Marginalised Groups; Digital Security; and Human Rights and Freedoms — selected from 449 session proposals submitted by speakers in 51 countries, a roughly 30 percent increase over the 346 proposals received for the previous edition.

Context

The Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum is the signature convening artefact of Paradigm Initiative — a pan-African digital-rights and digital-inclusion non-profit headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria, operating across more than twenty-seven African countries from sub-regional offices in Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Zambia, and Zimbabwe — and the principal continent-wide gathering at which African civil-society positions on digital rights, internet shutdowns, biometric surveillance, content moderation, and AI policy are negotiated face-to-face. The Forum began in August–December 2013 as the Internet Freedom Forum (IFF), with invitation letters sent to fifty-three Nigerians producing the first IFF in Lagos on 20 September 2013; the Forum was subsequently renamed the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum and has run annually since. DRIF23 marked the tenth edition in Nairobi, Kenya in 2023, and DRIF24 the eleventh in Accra, Ghana in 2024.

DRIF26's siting in Abidjan was structurally significant within the Forum's own arc. Paradigm Initiative's pan-African footprint has been built primarily across Anglophone and Lusophone Africa — Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Cameroon — with Senegal as the Forum's first sub-regional Francophone office; its previous DRIF editions had been held in Anglophone capitals (Abuja, Lagos, Nairobi, Accra). The Abidjan edition, explicitly framed by Paradigm Initiative as the first DRIF in a Francophone country, was a deliberate move to "bridge the digital rights advocacy gap between Anglophone and Francophone Africa" — a framing that recurs across English-language coverage of the announcement — and to expand the Forum's footprint into Francophone West Africa, the principal regional gap in its own continental coverage. The country partnership with CIDDH, the Ivorian Coalition of Human Rights Defenders led by National Coordinator Marthe Coulibaly, supplied the local civil-society infrastructure on which the Forum was operationally grounded.

The Forum's funder roster reflected its scale: the 10 named DRIF26 sponsors were the Ford Foundation (in corpus), Google, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Luminate (in corpus), the Human Rights Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation (in corpus), the Mott Foundation, TikTok, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, and the Wikimedia Foundation — a multi-stakeholder funding base spanning private US philanthropy, public Canadian development funding, social-platform commercial sponsorship, and movement-allied tech-foundation support.

What happened over the three days

DRIF26 was structured as a three-day programme of plenaries, working sessions, and side-meetings convened across the six thematic tracks, with launches and announcements distributed across the agenda. Plenaries opened with the country partner and convening organisation — Marthe Coulibaly of CIDDH and Gbenga Sesan of Paradigm Initiative — alongside Bahaa El-Taweal, Global Policy Lead at Google Government Affairs and Public Policy; Meseret Melat Fassil, Legal Officer at the African Union; internet-governance expert Nnenna Nwakanma; and Thobekile Matimbe, Senior Manager at Paradigm Initiative, in the keynote roster.

The thematic-track programme spanned the six declared areas. Across the AI and emerging-technologies track, sessions sat alongside the IDRC-backed information-integrity report release that placed African civil-society research on disinformation, generative AI's role in election cycles, and platform-governance asymmetries in the formal record. The trust-and-accountability and data-protection-and-privacy tracks paired with the launch of the Digital Rights On-Demand Learning platform (DROL), Paradigm Initiative's e-learning vehicle for African civil-society capacity-building on digital-security and digital-rights advocacy. The digital-inclusion track was anchored on a Wikimedia-sponsored sub-programme — DRIF26 was the fourth consecutive year of Wikimedia Foundation sponsorship — that produced four named sessions on 15 April: "Open Knowledge for Youth Digital Inclusion: Rights, Skills, and Participation" (10:10–11:10 GMT); "An Internet in Many Tongues: Exploring and Celebrating African Languages through Community-Led Digital Public Goods" (same slot); "Wiki Loves DRIF: Inclusion numérique par la photographie dans les projets Wikimedia" (13:50–14:50 GMT); and "Linguistic mutualization with Wikidata" (16:10–17:10 GMT), with Barakat Adegboye, Nkem Osuigwe, Peace Agada, Willy Buloso, Emmanuel Ngue Um, Regine Njiké, Emmanuelle Guebo Kakou, and Mark Lapang among the named community speakers.

The Forum's most consequential single set-piece release sat on the human-rights-and-freedoms track: the 2025 Londa report, Paradigm Initiative's annual state-of-digital-rights-in-Africa publication, officially unveiled at DRIF26 with a new Digital Rights Score Index benchmarking countries on access to information, freedom of expression, privacy protections, and digital inclusion. The report named South Africa as top-ranked for the second consecutive year and reported Botswana and Egypt improving by over nine places, with Nigeria declining by five places and Cameroon by ten — a calibrated cross-country evidence base for the advocacy conversations the Forum is structurally for. At the launch, Sesan placed the report inside Paradigm Initiative's own theory of advocacy: "a society is only as strong as how it treats its weakest members... only through honest evaluation and evidence can we understand the gaps". The Forum also hosted Freedom Online Coalition 15th-anniversary engagement sessions alongside the substantive programme.

Significance

DRIF26 is the corpus's first Event located on the African continent west of Nairobi, the first Event located in a Francophone country, the first Event located in Côte d'Ivoire, and the first pan-African civil-society annual-convening Event of any kind in the corpus's events register — closing the Sub-Saharan Africa convening anchor (previously zero — the corpus's only African events had been a 2023 Kenyan content-moderators-union founding vote and a 2023 LAWS-related communiqué), the West Africa / Francophone Africa anchor (previously zero), the pan-African multi-country convening sub-type, and the Forum's own institutional presence in the corpus's events surface (Paradigm Initiative's body had named DRIF as its signature convening artefact, but the corpus had no Event entry standing in for any DRIF edition). The Abidjan edition's siting in Francophone West Africa — a region whose civil-society digital-rights organising is largely absent from the corpus's existing organisational register — makes it the structurally most significant single Event currently in the corpus for closing the corpus's largest regional coverage gap.

Within the Forum's own arc, DRIF26 is the moment at which Paradigm Initiative's pan-African footprint pivoted from an Anglophone-and-Lusophone shape to an explicitly continental one. The 29.7 percent year-on-year increase in session-proposal volume (449 from 51 countries against 346 the prior year), against the choice to site the Forum at the edge of the organisation's existing geographic reach, registers as the convening's working theory of change: that the African digital-rights field is large enough and active enough to fund and staff a pan-African annual gathering of this scale, and that the Forum's continued credibility as the principal continent-wide civil-society digital-rights convening depends on its actually reaching the parts of the continent the corpus has historically struggled to surface. The combined three-day programme — the six thematic tracks; the 2025 Londa report launch as the Forum's evidentiary spine; the DROL platform unveiling as its capacity-building output; the IDRC information-integrity report as its research output; the Freedom Online Coalition engagement as its multilateral institutional bridge; and the Wikimedia-sponsored open-knowledge sub-programme as its digital-public-goods edge — is the corpus's most complete single picture of how African civil-society organising on AI, internet rights, and digital inclusion actually meets, talks, and produces shared positions in 2026.