S3 E6: #Tech4Rights- Children’s rights to privacy in the digital sphere in Africa

In conversation with Ms Opal Sibanda

The annual campaign for the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria is #Tech4Rights: Rethinking a human rights-based approach to new technologies in Africa. The campaign focuses on the impact of new technologies on different aspects of human interaction and the impact of technology on human rights. This campaign has a series of activities that look into technology in various specific areas.

The use of digital technologies has become an essential aspect of most people’s daily lives and children are not an exception to this. The digital space exposes children to new ideas and diverse sources of information. Using digital technologies also arguably exposes children to new opportunities to learn, reduces inequalities and contributes to the realisation of their rights such as the right to education, the right to privacy, freedom of expression, access to information and public participation. Adversely,  the use of digital technologies also presents risks for children. The focus of the  this episode  is to contextualise the long term effects of internet use on children’s well-being,  to find ways to support a positive and effective use of digital gadgets in advancing  children’s rights and addressing inequalities in children’s access to technology and to inform and guide policy makers, child rights activists and parents alike, on how to maximise the potential of technological advancement.

Ms Opal Sibanda is an Assistant Legal Researcher at the Secretariat of the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. She obtained her  LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa (HRDA) from the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria in 2020. She has extensive experience in children's rights and has interests in juvenile justice and children’s rights in the digital age.

Music: Inner Peace by Mike Chino https://soundcloud.com/mike-chinoCreative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/0nI6qJeqFcc