Governance-by-Design as an Enabler of AI in Digital Health in Sub-Saharan Africa
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University of York
United Kingdom
Abstract
To harness the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled healthcare, access to data is a crucial component of AI in digital health technology development and adoption. This requires effective frameworks of digital and data governance. This paper highlights important digital, data, and data-related issues that present unique and pressing challenges to such adoption in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Specific non-exclusive challenges in SSA arise from issues around data integrity and quality, interoperability, and data provenance. Related emerging issues centre on surveillance capitalism, data commodification, and coloniality. Certain digital and data governance strategies and solutions in support of the public good are in place and include various legal rights, regulatory policies, and ethics frameworks. Building on these solutions, I advance an innovative and supplementary mechanism of grounding digital and data governance on the theoretical approach of human-centric design and on ideas of embedding ethics and law. As illustrated in India, this ‘third way’ of ‘governance-by-design’ practically embeds and operationalises rules as protocols within the infrastructure and architecture of the technology itself. Accordingly, an inclusive and augmented data and digital governance-by-design solution is offered as an enabler of AI in digital health in SSA.
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Author Biography
Dr Bev Townsend is a Research Fellow at the York Law School, University of York. She was awarded a BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) Fellowship from the AHRC in collaboration with Microsoft Research, Cambridge where she works on Medical AI and Sociotechnical Harm. She has expertise in integrating law and ethics into resilient embodied-AI systems (robots), an area in which she has been a researcher and Co-I on joint projects, including the UKRI REASON, Reimagining Autonomous Systems with Disabled Young People, ASPEN, and DAISY projects. Her research has focused on AI, data protection law, data sharing and international data transfers, digital constitutionalism, human rights, biotechnologies, medical law, and policy regulation and governance both in the United Kingdom and South Africa. Prior to this she was a legal professional in South Africa for over 12 years.
