Digital governance and civic innovation in the Sahel: the three-legged stool

In many African cultures, the three-legged stool is the steadiest everyday object there is. Three legs, not four. Each one indispensable. Remove a single one and the whole thing collapses. I offer that image as a way of reading digital governance in West Africa and the Sahel.

The region is going through heavy change: political and institutional transitions in several countries, a crisis of trust between citizens and public institutions, persistent security challenges, demographic shifts. In West and Central Africa, more than 64 per cent of the population is under 24. In some Sahel countries, the under-25s exceed 60 per cent. We are not facing a "minority youth" to be managed. We are facing a demographic majority that is not waiting for room to be made at the table: it is building the table.

Two symmetrical errors threaten public policy. The first treats this generation as a risk, a mass to be contained, occupied, watched. The second gives them a rhetorical role in speeches about participation while never opening the doors of decision-making. Both produce the same result: demographic energy turning into frustration, radical protest, or the departure of talent.

Democratic resilience in the Sahel is not settled by accumulating technological tools. It rests on the coherence between three pillars. People: their skills, their leadership, their ownership as citizens. Process: legal frameworks, reformed public services, spaces for participation. Technology and Data: digital tools and open data as levers of accountability and civic innovation.

These three pillars do not add up. They condition one another. That is my argument, built from documented African experience and from field engagement in co-building public policy in Senegal and across the region.

Human capital, the first engine of digital governance

No digital tool works without the women and men able to understand it, criticise it and steer it. It is the most obvious truth of digital transformation, and the one African public strategies most often neglect, favouring investment in infrastructure and equipment.

In West Africa and the Sahel, young people make up more than 65 per cent of the population. That demographic power becomes governance power only if it is cultivated. UNESCO and UNDP reports keep repeating that without digital skills and media literacy, technology widens inequality instead of narrowing it. In too many rural Sahelian schools, the computer room is a slogan painted on a wall. The gap between the promise and the reality is the first ground on which the next generation is included or excluded.

Training for governance skills, not only for market jobs

Training has to be rethought in its purpose. Preparing young people for jobs in the private digital sector is a legitimate objective, and a short one. We need to train an entire generation in digital governance: understanding how public budgets work, reading a tender document, assessing the impact of a public policy, handling citizen monitoring tools.

At Ubuntu University, this conviction has shaped our teaching for several years. I have worked with young people from Côte d'Ivoire to Benin and on to Chad, designing digital solutions with real weight: platforms for rating public services, tools for evaluating public action, spaces for citizen deliberation online.

The speed of the change is striking. In three and a half months, young people with no technical background imagine, prototype and carry concrete solutions for their communities. Where there was neither code nor confidence, a capacity to act appears. They stop being users of technology and become its designers.

That shift, from passive use to co-design, is what any policy of training for digital governance should aim at. It does not happen on its own. It takes safe spaces to learn, mentors who believe in these young people before they believe in themselves, and institutions willing to recognise their solutions as legitimate.

Including young women: a condition, not an option

The gender divide in African digital life is documented and severe. Young women are less connected, less equipped, less visible online, less represented in technology training. The World Bank reports that millions of young African women have said they feel shut out of the benefits of the digital revolution. In sub-Saharan Africa, the gap between men's and women's internet use exceeds 20 points in several countries.

This exclusion is not a technical detail to be corrected at the margins of a digital governance policy. It is the central fault line. A digital governance that sidelines half of its young people loses half of its capacity to innovate, half of its community roots, and half of its democratic legitimacy. Parity in access to digital skills is an operational condition of resilience.

That means programmes giving girls and young women in rural areas access to digital training, measures against the online harassment that suppresses participation, and active representation of young women in the bodies that co-design digital policy.

Mentoring as a chain of leadership

The region passes leadership badly from one generation to the next. Former leaders and young innovators move in separate circles, with no space to meet or to argue. Mentoring, understood as dialogue between generations rather than a hierarchical relationship, is one of the strongest levers for closing that gap.

In Senegal, our involvement in the National Youth Digital Debate and in the inter-ministerial committee on the Youth, Peace and Security agenda showed us the value of mixed spaces: young developers and activists at the same table as public decision-makers and senior researchers. Such arrangements work on one condition, that they are designed as real spaces of co-construction rather than consultation ceremonies with no follow-through.

“A state does not 'digitise' itself. Its citizens take hold of the tools, contest them, improve them.”

Reforming the rules, not only the tools

Debates on digital transformation underrate this pillar. Technology gets talked about at length. The rules that let technology produce trust, inclusion and transparency get talked about far too little.

Digitising public services achieves nothing if it means putting the same opaque procedures, the same impenetrable forms and the same exclusionary logic online. I call this "digital glazing": a handsome technological facade concealing unchanged institutional practice. It sustains citizens' distrust and wastes the resources invested.

The legal framework as shield and as compass

A reformed process starts with a protective legal framework. Without clear laws on personal data protection, freedom of expression online and equitable internet access, digital transformation becomes an instrument of surveillance and political control. The hypothesis is not theoretical: internet shutdowns during electoral periods in several African countries show how digital infrastructure turns against fundamental rights.

ISS Africa and EISA have documented this rise in information controls during African elections. The legal framework therefore has two roles. Shield, protecting citizens against abusive use of digital tools by states. Compass, steering digital transformation towards accountability, transparency and inclusion.

This legal dimension cannot be separated from artificial intelligence. In Senegal, we worked on the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, building in the ethical governance of algorithms and the protection of data from the design stage. That work raised a fundamental question: how do you guarantee that AI serves human rights rather than circumventing them? The strategic use of public data and the ethical governance of AI are not constraints to be imposed afterwards. They are conditions of legitimate governance.

Public services redrawn around the user

Several African experiences show that processes can be reformed with ambition. Irembo in Rwanda redesigned more than a hundred public services around the user's experience, sharply reducing the time and cost of dealing with the administration. The key to that success is not technological: it was starting from what citizens actually need rather than from what civil servants are used to. In Ghana, e-Zwich brought millions of citizens without bank accounts into the formal economy and into state social transfers. Both examples reformed the process before imposing the tool.

Young people understanding decision cycles

An inclusive process is also a decision cycle that young people understand and can enter. Knowing how a budget is voted, how funds are released, how a law is amended: that is the base condition for moving from protest to influence.

Follow The Money in Nigeria shows what a young person armed with that understanding and the right digital tools can do. Analysing budget allocations meant for Bagega, a mining village hit by lead poisoning, young citizen journalists found that the money promised had never been spent. They launched the #SaveBagega campaign, mobilised the media, and pressed representatives at federal level and in Zamfara State. Around 5 million dollars was eventually released for decontamination and for the health care of residents. Digital tools did not replace the process. They made it accountable.

We worked in that spirit when we co-built Senegal's National Good Governance Strategy. We did not only invite experts and technicians. Young developers, social entrepreneurs and activists took part in the workshops, shared their fears and expectations, and put forward proposals. It was a tangible step towards an approach "by young people and with young people" rather than "for young people".

“Technology opens doors. It is the processes, the laws, the procedures, the spaces for participation, that decide who may enter, who may stay, and who has the right to speak.”

The lever, not the purpose

This third pillar often gets presented as the first, sometimes as the only one. That is the error of perspective I want to correct. Technology and data are powerful levers. A lever with no competent hand to hold it, the People pillar, and no clear rules to aim it, the Process pillar, is useless at best and dangerous at worst.

With that caution in place, we can appreciate what African civic tech is producing on the continent. This generation does not wait for permission to innovate. It builds tools, platforms and networks that reshape the relationship between citizens and institutions.

African civic tech at work

BudgIT, founded in Nigeria, is one of the most documented and most replicated examples on the continent. The organisation starts from a simple observation: public budgets are bulky technical documents that very few citizens read. BudgIT turns finance laws into accessible infographics, interactive maps and usable web platforms. Its Tracka tool lets citizens see which projects are planned in their community, flag those that are unfinished or non-existent, and press local authorities. GovSpend, another tool in the BudgIT ecosystem, tracks actual disbursements, detects questionable spending and compares budget commitments against what was delivered.

These tools are not built by governance experts for governance experts. Young people build them so that other citizens, including thousands of young people, can "see" public money and ask for an account. It is citizen accountability, organised, replicable and documented. Its impact has been recognised internationally: these tools have caught and corrected failures of public management that the classic institutional mechanisms had let through.

Ushahidi, born in Kenya in the context of the post-electoral violence of 2007-2008, represents another form of civic innovation. This participatory mapping platform collects, visualises and aggregates citizen reports in real time: electoral incidents, breakdowns in public services, natural disasters, administrative obstacles. It has since been deployed in dozens of countries and supported by the African Union's Civic Tech Fund. In a Sahelian setting, it could map incidents at school, access to water, or the state of rural roads, the kind of data that makes evidence-based advocacy possible.

Open data as a commons

Public data, open and accessible, becomes a commons of considerable power. It allows advocacy grounded in facts rather than opinions. It lets citizen journalists, civil society organisations and researchers monitor the implementation of public policy independently. It narrows the information asymmetry between the governed and those who govern, one of the sources of the crisis of trust the region is living through.

In Senegal, an open geospatial data portal already shares information on health, education and energy, so that civil society, researchers and entrepreneurs can build solutions on real data. That kind of infrastructure can become the raw material of the next generation's civic innovation. The emergence of an active digital identity takes on its full meaning here: it lets young people influence national and local decision-making by producing evidence and documented counter-proposals, and not only through protest.

The divides and the dangers

Celebrating the potential of civic tech without facing the divides that limit it would be dishonest.

The digital divide is the first barrier. Across Africa, internet use is on average two to three times higher in cities than in rural areas. Figures from the International Telecommunication Union confirm that many young people in the Sahel live in exactly those places where connection is expensive, unstable and sometimes absent. A civic tech policy that ignores this consolidates an urban, connected governance and leaves rural areas and the most precarious populations behind.

Disinformation and online harassment form the second divide. The technologies that enable citizen mobilisation also enable manipulation. Social networks amplify misleading narratives on an unprecedented scale. Artificial intelligence produces deepfakes and synthetic content that blur the line between information and manipulation. The effect on electoral processes is documented: disinformation erodes trust in institutions and reduces electoral participation among young people, the most connected generation of all.

A TechCabal study shows that a majority of civic tech organisations in Nigeria have seen their funding fall in recent years, at the very moment their tools became indispensable to democratic debate. That paradox points to the third divide: weak institutional recognition and the absence of durable funding for digital initiatives led by young people. Too many innovations appear, shine for a few months, and die for want of a lasting ecosystem.

Faced with these risks, repressive responses, internet shutdowns, platform blocking, VPN restrictions during elections, are disproportionate against fundamental rights and counterproductive for democratic resilience. They deepen the crisis of trust they claim to contain, by signalling to young people that their ability to speak online depends on the mood of the authorities.

“Data enriches or pollutes according to the hand that controls it and the rules that govern it.”

Towards agile governance, centred on the user, with young people at its heart

The three pillars do not add up mechanically. They condition one another, and their coherence is what makes the model solid. Consider what happens when one of them is missing.

A state that invests heavily in technology without reforming its processes produces digital frustration. Online platforms that do not answer, forms nobody can read, citizens clicking without ever being heard. Technology then amplifies the dysfunction rather than the governance. Users give up, and distrust of digital institutions settles in.

A state that trains young people without opening the doors of its institutions produces talent that leaves: for other countries, for the international private sector, for protest with no route to influence. Brain drain and the radicalisation of youth protest are two faces of the same failure.

A state that opens its data without protecting its citizens' rights produces fear. Fear of being watched, profiled, reduced to a statistic. Where trust between young people and institutions is already fragile, that fear discourages the most innovative and most critical participation, exactly what democratic governance needs most.

When the three pillars line up, young people trained and included, processes open and secured by a robust legal framework, technology and data serving the common good, governance becomes more agile, more transparent, closer to local realities. It adapts in real time to what communities need, corrects its mistakes, and keeps the bond of trust between institutions and citizens.

The experiences cited in this article, Irembo in Rwanda, BudgIT and Follow The Money in Nigeria, Ushahidi in Kenya, e-Zwich in Ghana, the national AI and good governance strategies in Senegal, share one trait. None succeeded by working on a single pillar. All built a coherent ecosystem across human training, institutional reform and technological deployment. That alignment is what let them reach scale.

The idea of an ecosystem is central here. Resilient digital governance does not come out of a one-off project or a sector reform. It comes out of an environment where human skills, legal frameworks, public services, civic initiatives and open data interact cumulatively. Building that ecosystem takes time, a strategic vision and sustained political commitment.

This model of agile governance is no utopia. It is being built, with advances and setbacks, in several countries of the region. The proof that it can be done exists. What remains is whether states, civil society organisations, regional institutions and international partners will invest in that coherence, instead of continuing to fund technological projects disconnected from processes and from people.

Six priority recommendations for states, regional institutions, civil society organisations, and technical and financial partners.

Reform education systems to include digital governance

School and university curricula should include modules on civic digital skills: technical skills, and also an understanding of institutions, budget processes and citizen monitoring tools. Training programmes in partnership with universities, civic incubators and civil society organisations should be developed and funded over the long term.

Adopt protective, inclusive legal frameworks

Every country in the region should have a personal data protection law, a regulatory framework for freedom of expression online and a policy of equitable internet access. These frameworks should be co-built with young people and civil society. A regional moratorium on internet shutdowns during electoral processes should be discussed and adopted within UEMOA and ECOWAS.

Fund the civic tech ecosystem durably

National funds and international partners should create durable funding mechanisms for African civic tech organisations. Incubators specialising in civic innovation should be developed, resourced and connected in a regional network. Institutional recognition of digital initiatives led by young people, starting with their inclusion in official consultations, should become standard practice.

Build open data infrastructure

States should invest in open data portals covering public budgets, public procurement, development indicators and geospatial data. These portals should be usable by citizens who are not experts. Partnerships with Development Gateway, Open Contracting Partnership and Open Knowledge Foundation can accelerate the transition.

Institutionalise young people's participation in decision-making

Structural mechanisms, not symbolic ones, should bring young people into budget cycles, legislative processes and the evaluation of public policy. Quotas for young people on advisory bodies and governance committees should come with resources and real influence, not just seats.

Invest in mentoring and intergenerational transmission

Every country should develop structured mentoring programmes between former leaders and young leaders. These programmes should transmit skills, and also values of public ethics, responsibility and service. Regional networks of young leaders in digital governance, on the model of the alumni of Africa's major governance schools, would speed the spread of innovation and learning.

The societies that succeed in moving to inclusive digital governance are not the ones with the most fibre optic cable or the most government applications. They are the ones that have aligned their citizens' skills, the quality of their public processes and the power of their digital tools behind a single vision: a democracy that trusts its young people.

Ubuntu philosophy teaches us: "I am because we are." In digital governance, the right to be heard, to take part and to be protected online depends on how we collectively organise our people, our processes and our technologies. It rests neither on brilliant individuals nor on benevolent governments. It rests on a social architecture, on the coherence between the pillars.

Young people in the Sahel are no longer waiting for a small place at the table. Through the National Youth Digital Debate in Senegal, BudgIT and Follow The Money in Nigeria, Ushahidi in Kenya and across Africa, thousands of young women and men are already building the next generation of governance. They document, analyse, propose, challenge. They are no longer observers of governance. They are its actors.

Our collective responsibility, as institutions, as partners, as elders, is to choose: stand next to this stool, or sit down on it with this generation to co-design the next generation of governance in the Sahel.

The stool stands on three legs. Each one is indispensable. Remove a single one and everything collapses. When the three hold together, People at the heart, Process as the frame, Technology as the lever, governance becomes what it always should be: a commons, built by all, for all.

Papa Massamba Ndiaye is an African leader working on the transformation of public systems and the development of young people's leadership. Graduate in public law and international relations. President of Ubuntu University, he applies his expertise to the empowerment of African youth, to digital transformation and to the promotion of ethical leadership across the continent. Involved in public policy work in Senegal, he contributed to the co-creation of the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy and to the drafting of the National Good Governance Strategy. He sits on the inter-ministerial committee for the "Youth, Peace and Security" agenda and on the Galien Africa Taskforce. Known as "The Man of Ubuntu", he was made a Knight of the National Order of Merit by the State of Senegal.

1. Scoping note, Panel 1, 9th Gorée Institute Symposium (2026)

2. UNFPA, Adolescents and Youth Report: West and Central Africa

3. Civic Tech Africa, Illustrating the Use of Open Data to Drive Transparency and Accountability

4. World Bank, Open data on the ground: Nigeria's Follow the Money

5. New African Magazine, Mabingue Ngom: We can make a real difference in the Sahel

6. Concept note, 9th Annual Gorée Institute Symposium (2026)

7. DataCup, Digital Divide in Africa: A Gap Between Urban and Rural

8. UNDP, Youth in Africa: a demographic imperative for peace and security

9. World Bank, Africa's young people speak out about ending digital exclusion

10. IntechOpen, e-Governance and Anti-Corruption War in Africa

11. UNDP, e-Governance and Citizen Participation in West Africa

12. ISS Africa, Offline and silenced: Africa's quiet rise of internet repression

13. EISA, Information controls and internet shutdowns in African elections

14. MacArthur Foundation, Follow the Money in Kaduna State

15. EPD, Assessing Civic Tech That Works to Build #TheAfricaWeWant

16. SAIIA, Civic Tech in Southern Africa: Alternative Democracy

17. BudgIT, Leads with Civic Technology Tools for Africa's Democracy

18. BudgIT, MAVC Research Report

19. African Union, Highlighting Ushahidi's Ongoing Role in the Civic Tech Fund

20. African Union, 15 Civic Tech Organizations selected finalists

21. Development Gateway, Open Data in Senegal

22. ITU, Internet use in urban and rural areas (Statistics)

23. GPPi, Digital Threats to Elections: Learning From What Has Worked

24. TechCabal, Nigeria's Civic Tech Funding Crisis

25. Digital governance for democratic integrity in West African States

26. The Yaakaar Initiative, Transforming Lives in Dakar's Suburbs