CIPESA

CIPESA (Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa) is a Kampala-headquartered ICT policy and governance think tank founded in 2004 as the institutional anchor for evidence-based digital rights advocacy across Africa's East and Southern subregions. Operating from Plot 10B Katalima Crescent, Naguru in Kampala, Uganda, CIPESA pursues a mission to "promote inclusive and effective use of ICT in Africa for improved governance and livelihoods" across five substantive areas: data governance, internet freedom, civic participation, digital resilience, and digital inclusion. The organisation runs the continent's premier annual digital rights forum (FIFAfrica), publishes the twelve-year-long State of Internet Freedom in Africa (SIFA) report series, and administers the African Digital Rights Fund — three programme lines that together constitute the most operationally dense civil-society infrastructure on African digital rights. Executive Director Wairagala Wakabi leads the organisation alongside Chief of Party Peter G. Mwesige, Head of Programmes Ashnah Kalemera, and a staff of twenty, including Senior Researcher Victor Kapiyo and Research and Communications Officer Juliet Nanfuka.

Founding and mandate

CIPESA was established in 2004 under the UK Department for International Development's (DfID) Catalysing Access to ICT in Africa (CATIA) initiative, in direct response to the Louder Voices Report for DfID — a research document that identified the lack of easy, affordable, and timely access to ICT policy information as a structural barrier to effective policymaking by African governments and civil society. The founding mandate was therefore information-infrastructure before advocacy: CIPESA was constituted as a research and policy-information organisation, a positioning that persists in its output mix. Within its first decade CIPESA had reoriented that mandate into an explicit digital rights framework, becoming one of the earliest African civil-society organisations to frame ICT-policy work as a human rights issue rather than purely a development or governance question.

The organisation's vision is to serve as Africa's premier ICT policy and governance research institution, and its work reflects that premium-research positioning: CIPESA produces primary research (the SIFA reports), convenes multi-stakeholder platforms (FIFAfrica), administers re-granting infrastructure (the African Digital Rights Fund), runs fellowship and capacity-building programmes (including the Digital Public Infrastructure Fellowship and the PWD Changemakers initiative for persons with disabilities), and pursues strategic litigation. The legal programme, led by Programme Manager Legal Edrine Wanyama, gives CIPESA a distinctive litigation-capable profile that distinguishes it from research-only think tanks and from global coalition infrastructure like Access Now and the Association for Progressive Communications.

State of Internet Freedom in Africa report series

The State of Internet Freedom in Africa (SIFA) report series, launched in 2014 and now in its twelfth edition, is CIPESA's flagship annual research output and one of the most sustained civil-society evidence bases on digital rights in Africa. Each edition examines a distinct dimension of digital governance. The thematic arc traces the shifting frontier of digital rights concerns on the continent: from government censorship (2014) through user privacy and security (2015), governmental strategies to restrict digital rights (2016), internet intermediaries (2017), data protection gaps (2018), two decades of internet control evolution (2019), COVID-19 and digital rights (2020), surveillance's chilling effects on democratic participation (2021), and biometric surveillance risks (2022) — reaching technology and elections (2024) and artificial intelligence's democratic implications (2025). Each annual SIFA is launched at FIFAfrica on the final day of the forum, ensuring maximum civil-society and media visibility.

The State of Internet Freedom in Africa 2025: Navigating the Implications of AI on Digital Democracy in Africa is a 14-country qualitative survey authored by Juliet Nanfuka and launched at FIFAfrica25 in Windhoek, Namibia on 29 September 2025. The 2025 edition marks the first in the SIFA series to make AI its central subject, finding that a country's democratic quality is the primary determinant of whether AI serves or undermines civic participation. It documents AI-powered surveillance producing self-censorship across multiple countries, the absence of AI-specific legislation in all 14 study countries, and the use of large language models by pro-government propagandists in Rwanda for synthetic social-media messaging — the first documented African case of LLM-enabled state-adjacent influence operations in the series. The 2024 SIFA edition had already documented AI-generated deepfakes in Rwanda and South Africa during that year's electoral cycle, making the transition to the 2025 AI-on-democracy frame a natural one given the SIFA data.

Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa

The Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa (FIFAfrica) is CIPESA's annual multi-stakeholder convening for the digital rights field, established in 2014 as the continent's dedicated platform for civil society, policymakers, technologists, journalists, and academics to address Africa-specific digital rights challenges. The forum is structurally analogous to RightsCon for the global field but anchored in the East and Southern African region, with a mandate explicitly addressed to African governance contexts.

The forum rotates locations across the continent — having been hosted in Kampala, Johannesburg, Accra, Addis Ababa, Lusaka, Dar es Salaam, Dakar, and Windhoek across its twelve editions. The programme structure splits between pre-events (technical workshops, network meetings) and a main forum running concurrent thematic tracks. The 2022 Lusaka edition ran 21 concurrent thematic tracks and drew approximately 300 participants from 47 countries — the first fully in-person edition since 2019. Participants at recent editions have included Access Now, the Association for Progressive Communications, and Paradigm Initiative, with Access Now co-running a Digital Security Hub at the 2022 Lusaka edition. The AI governance track has been a standing feature: the 2022 Lusaka edition addressed AI-adjacent biometric surveillance; the 2025 Windhoek edition prompted participants, including CIPESA as a Global Network Initiative member, to consolidate recommendations for human rights-centred AI governance frameworks, local AI oversight capacity, and AI development in indigenous African languages.

African Digital Rights Fund

The African Digital Rights Fund (ADRF) is a pan-African rapid-response re-granting programme established by CIPESA in April 2019 and administered by CIPESA as the host organisation. The fund makes grants of USD 1,000–10,000 with six-month grant periods to African civil-society organisations advancing digital rights through advocacy, litigation, research, policy analysis, digital literacy, and digital-security skills-building. CIPESA holds the donor relationships and manages the grant cycles; cumulative disbursement reached USD 1.3 million across ten rounds through April 2026, covering 18 projects in 14 countries in the most recent round alone. Donors have included the Open Society Foundations, Hewlett Foundation, Omidyar Network, and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund across its rounds. The ADRF's pooled re-granting structure positions CIPESA as a vehicle through which several of the world's largest digital-rights donors reach smaller and harder-to-fund African civil-society actors — giving CIPESA unusual breadth of knowledge about what organisations are doing digital rights work across the continent and what they need.

AI governance posture

CIPESA's engagement with AI as a governance challenge predates the generative-AI era: the SIFA series launched in 2014 when AI-in-Africa meant government biometric deployments. By 2022 CIPESA was tracking AI-adjacent biometric surveillance as the dominant AI-and-rights concern; by 2024 the SIFA edition had shifted to AI and elections; by 2025 the series had made AI's democratic implications its central subject across a fourteen-country scope. The progression tracks the broader trajectory of African civil society's encounter with AI — from state surveillance tools to electoral manipulation to AI governance frameworks as the policy register the field now works in.

At international level, CIPESA's GNI membership places it within the multi-stakeholder framework covering technology companies, investors, civil society, and academia committed to protecting freedom of expression and privacy. CIPESA's Project Officer Daniel Mwesigwa presented on AI-enabled surveillance tools at the 2019 Internet Governance Forum in Berlin at the GISWatch 2019 AI edition launch — one of the earliest documented moments of African civil society bringing AI-surveillance research to a global governance forum. CIPESA also collaborated with AfricTivistes on content moderation work during the 2024 Senegalese electoral crisis, and submitted guidance to the Kenyan government in 2026 urging strengthened AI policy and advocating for African sovereignty and agency in global AI governance.

Posture in the movement

CIPESA is the corpus's anchor organisation for East and Southern African digital rights civil society — the Kampala-based counterpart to Paradigm Initiative (Lagos, Anglophone-rooted pan-African digital rights) and AfricTivistes (Dakar, Francophone-West-African cyber-activism). The three programme lines — SIFA reports, FIFAfrica forum, African Digital Rights Fund — give CIPESA a unique tripartite infrastructure role: it produces the field's primary annual evidence base, convenes the field's primary annual forum, and redistributes funding to the field's hardest-to-reach actors. No other organisation in the corpus combines all three functions.

The corpus had carried CIPESA as a recurring reference across multiple entity types before this entity existed: the ADRF funder, the SIFA 2025 publication, Juliet Nanfuka's affiliation, the FIFAfrica 2022 Lusaka event, the AfricTivistes–CIPESA content moderation collaboration, and Daniel Mwesigwa's GISWatch 2019 panel presentation. This entry installs the org-cipesa anchor that all those references pointed toward.