African Data Privacy Laws

This book brings together a wide range of data protection perspectives from different African countries. It presents analyses of data protection systems of selected jurisdictions with data protection legislation in Africa, as well as countries without comprehensive data protection laws. The book canvasses data privacy law in the major legal systems in Africa: common and civil law. It also covers the South African mixed legal system. In addition, the book covers all sub-regional and regional data privacy policies in Africa. Apart from analysing data protection law, the book focuses on the socio-economic contexts, political settings and legal culture in which such laws developed and operate. It bases its analyses on the African legal culture and comparative international data privacy law.

In Africa protection of personal data, the central preoccupation of data privacy laws, is on the policy agenda. The recently adopted African Union Cyber Security and Data Protection Convention 2014, which is the first and currently the only single treaty across the globe to address data protection outside Europe, serves as an illustration of such interest. In addition, there are data protection frameworks at sub-regional levels for West Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa. Similarly, laws on protection of personal data are increasingly being adopted at national plane. Yet despite these data privacy law reforms there is scant literature about data privacy law in Africa and its recent developments. This book fills that gap.