CLP - Regulating the Digital Health Commons in the Global South

Speaker: Prof. Sharifah Sekalala (University of Warwick)

Chair: Prof. Emilie Cloatre (King's College London)

According to the Africa CDC, Artificial Intelligence is poised to play a key role in Africa’s disease surveillance and healthcare delivery. The Director of Digital Health Africa has called for a horizontal health record that would partner with the communications industry to connect every citizen and track people’s health over their life course to drive proactive care across integrated health systems. This centralisation of health data leads to increased questions about access. The main questions we explore in this lecture are access for whom, for what long-term purposes and for whose benefit.

Without a global oversight, the current transnational regulation of health data remains poor and inequitable. This has been catastrophic for many countries in the global south, where foreign states and private corporations are engaging in mass-scale data harvests. These range from the most egregious bilateral data agreements with the US under America’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ policy, to more benign extraction research exchange partnerships under data sharing agreements.

The digital commons is generally understood as a collectively governed digital resource system oriented toward shared access and collective benefit rather than private ownership or state monopoly. Increasingly, regulators are considering of using digital commons to address some of the problems of transnational data governance and derive collective benefits from health data sharing. Drawing on examples from indigenous communities, Mexico, Malaysia, Colombia, India and South Africa, the lecture will explore existing problems of scale, expertise and the complexity involved in long-term collective health data decision making, to advance a sociolegal critique of existing visions of the digital health commons. Using a decolonial lens, the lecture asks whether given the colonial legacies of language and extraction that are prevalent in commons literature, are there any emancipatory possibilities in designing and improving law around the common ownership, use and repurposing of collective digital health data?

Sharifah is a Professor of Global Health Law at the University of Warwick, Director of the Warwick Global Health Centre (Warwick). She is currently a Visiting Professor at Witts University in South Africa and a Co Director of University of Toronto/Warwick Global Health and Human Rights Training Program. She is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work is at the intersection of international law, public policy and global health. Professor Sekalala is particularly focused on the role of human rights frameworks in addressing global health inequalities. Her research has focused on health crises in Sub-Saharan Africa, international financing institutions and the rise of non-communicable diseases and she has published in leading legal, international relations and public health journals.

Professor Sekalala is currently leading and co-leading various funded projects including: Wellcome-Trust-funded project on digital health apps in Sub-Saharan Africa, After the end: Lived experiences and aftermaths of diseases, disasters and drugs in global health and an ESRC funded project on Advancing health data justice: A comparative study of health-related data governance in Canada, Germany and the UK.

Professor Sekalala is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FaSS) and an Honorary Member of the UK Faculty of Public Health. She has consulted on human rights and health in many developing countries and worked for international organisations such as UNAIDS, the WHO and the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Her research has also been funded by the Wellcome Trust, GCRF, ESRC, Open Society Foundation and international organisations including the International Labour Organisation and the WHO. Sharifah also sits on the Strategic Advisory Network of the ESRC.

Sharifah holds a PhD in Law (Warwick, 2012), an LLM in Public International Law (Distinction in research, Nottingham, 2006) and an LLB Honours (Makerere University, Uganda 2004). She was called to the Ugandan Bar in 2005.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship. Sign up for the mailing list to receive emails about Current Legal Problems lectures

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