GHANA has outrightly rejected a United States-backed health agreement over concerns about privacy, oversight and foreign access to sensitive national health data. According to reports, the deal would have allowed multiple US entities broad access to Ghana’s health information systems as part of a wider funding arrangement tied to healthcare support. Ghanaian authorities raised concerns about sovereignty, consent and the lack of sufficient control over how citizens’ data could be accessed and used.
Ghana is not alone. Zimbabwe has reportedly rejected a similar arrangement, while Zambia has also raised objections rooted in privacy and data governance concerns.
Across the continent, governments are beginning to confront a growing reality: that in the modern world, power no longer resides only in minerals, land and labour – it also resides in data. And increasingly, Africa is being asked to surrender that data under the language of aid, partnership and development.
For centuries, this continent has been treated as a site of extraction. Gold was taken. Diamonds were taken. Oil, cobalt, land and labour were taken. Colonialism evolved into economic dependency, and economic dependency evolved into financial conditionalities dressed up as cooperation. Today, we are watching extraction enter a new phase – digital extraction.
The resource of the future is not only beneath African soil. It is also inside African hospitals, databases, clinics and devices.
Health data carries immense value. It reveals behavioural patterns, population vulnerabilities, disease trends, infrastructure weaknesses and deeply personal information about millions of people. In the hands of powerful states, institutions and corporations, that data becomes influence. It becomes leverage. It becomes power.
That is why Ghana’s rejection matters.
At the centre of this debate is a dangerous assumption that has shaped Africa’s relationship with powerful nations for decades: that poverty weakens our right to refuse. That if a country is economically strained, underfunded or desperate enough, sovereignty becomes negotiable – that Africans should simply accept whatever conditions accompany aid because survival itself is treated as a privilege.
But healthcare assistance should not require surrendering democratic control over citizens’ personal information. Cooperation should not mean permanent access. And development cannot become a polite rebranding of surveillance.
Predictably, there are those who will dismiss these concerns as paranoia or anti-Western sentiment. They will argue that global health coordination requires cross-border data systems, that partnerships are essential for fighting disease outbreaks and improving healthcare delivery. And yes, international cooperation matters. Public health systems across the world rely on collaboration, research and shared expertise. But collaboration is not the same thing as unrestricted access.
There is a difference between ethical partnership and structural dependency. There is a difference between transparent data-sharing agreements and arrangements where powerful foreign entities gain disproportionate visibility into the internal systems of poorer nations. Most importantly, there is a difference between support that strengthens African institutions and support that quietly embeds foreign influence into the architecture of governance itself.
This issue is far bigger than one agreement. Across Africa, governments are rapidly digitising healthcare, banking, education, policing and identification systems — often with significant involvement from foreign governments and multinational technology companies. Yet in many cases, the regulatory protections surrounding these systems remain weak, underdeveloped or poorly enforced. Citizens are rarely informed about where their information goes, who accesses it or how long it is retained.
That creates the conditions for what many scholars and activists now describe as data colonialism — a system where African populations become sources of raw digital material for more powerful global actors, not through military occupation, but through infrastructure, platforms, contracts and dependency.
A continent that does not control its data cannot fully control its future. And this is precisely why the conversation around data sovereignty cannot remain trapped inside technical language reserved for policymakers and cybersecurity experts. This is a social justice issue. When privacy protections collapse, it is ordinary people who become exposed. It is vulnerable communities whose information becomes accessible. It is citizens who lose agency over their own identities and bodies.
What governments such as the United States need to understand is this: poor people deserve privacy too. African citizens deserve protection too. And African governments deserve the right to define the limits of foreign access without being penalised for it.
Ghana’s decision should therefore be understood as more than a diplomatic disagreement. It is part of a growing resistance against the idea that Africa must always trade away pieces of itself in exchange for support – a refusal to accept that sovereignty becomes optional whenever funding enters the room.
For far too long, this continent has been mined, monitored, measured and managed by foreign powers claiming to know what is best for us. We should be deeply cautious of any future where our data becomes the next frontier of extraction, especially when that extraction arrives wrapped in the language of humanitarian concern. As countless pan-African activists have long insisted: “The system does not fear the poor becoming rich. It fears the poor becoming conscious.”
- Tswelopele Makoe is a gender and social justice activist and editor at Global South Media Network. She is a researcher, columnist and Andrew W. Mellon scholar at the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape. The views expressed are her own.
