Former Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo has called on technology companies to take greater responsibility for protecting children from dangers associated with the digital world.
Osinbajo said the responsibility for online safety should not be placed primarily on children and their parents when digital platforms themselves may be designed in ways that expose young users to harm.
He made the call in Cairo, Egypt, while chairing a high-level session on child rights and accountability in digital product design at the 16th Annual Conference of the Pan African Lawyers Union.
The session, titled “Guardrails, Not Gates: Protecting Children in the Digital Age,” examined how technology companies, governments and regulators could create safer digital environments for children.
Osinbajo argued that companies should consider children’s safety from the point at which digital products are designed, rather than leaving families to deal with the consequences after harm occurs.
“We cannot build digital environments in which the risks are engineered into the product and then expect children and parents to carry the responsibility for managing those risks.”
He stressed that protecting children should not mean preventing them from accessing technology, but ensuring that digital platforms are developed with their welfare and rights in mind.
“The objective is not to build gates that exclude children from technology. It is to establish guardrails that ensure technology works for children rather than exploiting their vulnerabilities.”
Discussions at the conference addressed concerns including children’s exposure to harmful content, online exploitation, manipulation, excessive collection of personal information and risks linked to artificial intelligence systems.
Participants, comprising lawyers, judges, regulators, policymakers and child-rights advocates from different African countries, considered six key areas proposed for inclusion in the draft Cairo Declaration on Child Rights and Design Accountability in the Digital Age.
The proposed measures include safety-by-design requirements for platforms used by children, restrictions on manipulative and exploitative targeting, age-appropriate design standards, greater transparency in algorithms, stronger protection of children’s data and privacy-conscious age-verification mechanisms.
The Director of People-Centred Justice at the Justice Research Institute, Foluso Idumu-Shado, said African countries needed to become more involved in determining how technologies affecting children are designed and regulated.
“Children in Africa are entering a digital environment largely designed elsewhere. We must ensure that African children are not merely protected from the consequences of technology but that their rights and interests are considered in how digital technologies are designed, deployed and regulated.”
She said policymakers should move beyond responding to digital harms after they occur and instead establish rules that require technology developers to prioritise children’s interests.
Idumu-Shado added that the central question should be whether digital platforms serve the best interests of children, stressing that laws should require companies that design and profit from such systems to make necessary changes where they fail to meet that standard.
Following the deliberations, delegates presented a revised draft of the Cairo Declaration to the leadership of the Pan African Lawyers Union for further consideration.
The initiative also seeks to develop model laws and regulatory frameworks that African lawmakers, data protection agencies and other regulators can adapt to their respective countries.
