There is no App for that: Regulating the Migration of Health Data in Africa (Funded by the Novodisk Foundation and the Wellcome Trust (Eur 1,4 million)

With the dramatic increase in the collection of health data in recent years, health apps have been promoted as offering huge advances in the health of people in the Global South, but they also pose risks to privacy and ultimately to health outcomes. The project team will evaluate the data protection regimes and engage with key stakeholders in Kenya, South Africa and Uganda, to establish the extent to which they protect their citizens’ health data, especially in cross-border Health activities.

The interdisciplinary project led by Professor Sharifah Sekalala, Professor Bitange Ndemo and Professor Pamela Andanda seeks to analyse the regulation of health apps in Sub Saharan Africa in Uganda, Kenya and South Africa. Focusing on law, bioethics, entrepreneurship, epidemiology and policy makers, the project aims to bring together various stakeholders to empirically investigate how health apps are operating in practice, whether new forms of regulation are adequate in responding to potential problems, how different stakeholders perceive the regulatory framework and how we can create better regulatory frameworks.

Visit the project page.

There is no App for that: Regulating the Migration of Health Data in Africa (Funded by the Novodisk Foundation and the Wellcome Trust (Eur-50,000)

Health apps are increasingly being used in Sub-Saharan Africa. These health apps move health data from users to third-party actors, who are often based in other jurisdictions, and this frequently means from the global south to the global north. As noted by the African Union, this happens because most African countries depend on non-African manufacturers and service providers for their mobile networks, located outside the continent.

Digital health apps create complex legal and ethical problems, because data derived from them can be used to violate people’s privacy rights and by creating the opportunity for strategic uses of data that further embed structural disadvantage. In this project I will explore the ways in which domestic regulation can address this problem.

Using three case study countries – South Africa, Kenya and Uganda – which were all early adopters of data protection laws, I will evaluate these laws in in relation to privacy, and the validity of reports that health apps are being designed to exceed the remit of this legislation.

Catalyst Fund GCRF Integrating Legal Empowerment and Social Accountability for Sexual Reproductive health and HIV Services for Young People in Selected Slum Areas in Uganda (Funded by GCRF -37,671)

Working with a domestic human rights organisation in Uganda, (CEHURD) and colleagues from Warwick Medical School, this project is an applied human rights project which analyses how adolescent women and young girls can use the human rights framework in order to gain sexual an reproductive health services. This project is methodologically novel as it aims to co-produce knowledge with local human rights organisations, and young girls and women, in the promotion of sexual and reproductive rights, thereby producing tangible benefits for the people who are our research participants.

The African Feminist Judgments Project

The African Feminist Judgment Project is coordinated by Dr Sibongile Ndashe (Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa, Johannesburg), Dr Sharifah Sekalala (Warwick Law School) and Professor Ambreena Manji (Cardiff Law School). It builds on similar projects (Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and USA) to draft and disseminate alternative judgments for important African landmark cases on a range of legal issues.

At the heart of the project are the following questions — what might we mean by a landmark case in the African context? What is feminist judicial practice in Africa and what might we want it to be? How might alternative feminist judgments contribute to African jurisprudence, legal practice and judicial decision-making? What are the specific Constitutional and historical contexts within which the project must be understood?

https://www.lawandglobaljustice.com/the-african-feminist-judgments-project/

Pilot Project

Tobacco use is one of the biggest public health risks globally accounting for 7 million deaths annually. Many countries are trying to curb tobacco use by introducing laws which make it harder for people to access cigarettes. These laws have been met with strong opposition from tobacco companies, followed by court challenges in Canada, Australia, UK, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda. While some research has examined individual country cases, there has been no attempt to analyze the general trends of tobacco challenges in courts at the national level. Proposed as a pilot study, this research asks, ‘How do court challenges impact on countries attempts to create anti-tobacco legislation in commonwealth countries?’ Through a doctrinal analysis of court challenges and judgments, the research will examine patterns in these cases so as to find whether they are trends in the strategies that tobacco companies are using in this litigation, what is the role of the judiciary in promoting anti-tobacco legislation, and how government and civil society organizations can best respond proactively. Project findings will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, published online and presented to collaborators in 2018 as the basis of a comparative Investigator Award application to the Trust in 2019.

Leaving no one behind: Interdisciplinary workshop on Universal Health Coverage (April 2017)

Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is defined by the WHO to mean that all people receive the health services they need without suffering financial hardship when paying for them. UHC will be essential to ensure that African countries achieve their targets of reducing poverty and improving health under Sustainable Development Goal 1 and 3. The Institute of Advanced Studies, GRP on International Development and the Law School sponsored a multi-disciplinary workshop which focused on the legal, ethical, economic and epistemic, limits of universal health programmes. The workshop hosted a wide range of exciting talks from a number of scholars and practitioners who are working on UHC.