The Lawyers Hub Kenya has announced the convention of the next annual Africa LawTech Festival in June 2022. This year’s Festival is themed Africa-Europe Artificial Intelligence Policy Dialogue, and will take place in several countries across Africa and Europe between 5th-18th June, 2022.
Delegates for this year’s festival will include policymakers, scholars, law and technology enthusiasts, and practitioners coming together for pertinent conversations on various topics. These include artificial intelligence, exploring new approaches to digital trade and electoral governance.
The hybrid Festival will open with a digital rights concert in Nairobi followed by a two-day conference. Thereafter, a policy hackathon in Paris that aims to develop an AI Policy Roadmap for Africa, with policy dialogues in Accra, Capetown, Lagos, Geneva, Brussels and London. Delegates will also attend Republica, Europe’s largest digital society conference.
In 2020, the Lawyers Hub in Nairobi hosted over 1200 attendees from 20 African countries. Last year, the Festival brought together over 7500 law and tech professionals for the first virtual edition. These events have played a key role in facilitating new tech innovations and informing policy-making in Africa. The Africa Digital Rights Concert, which is a part of the festival, has also reimagined the communication of digital rights concerns such as privacy online.
Speaking at the announcement of the Festival, Omidyar Network’s Robert Karanja indicated that the Network was proud to be supporting the Festival for a third year. Since the enactment of the 2018 EU law on data protection and privacy, also known as GDPR,, similar data protection frameworks have increased in Africa. Space for dialogue and shared learnings are needed now more than ever as the continent begins to form these frameworks and there are greater calls for accountability, especially from AI-driven social media companies.