Orange phone booth, Central African Republic. Photo by DFID–UK Department for International Development via CC 2.0.
In November 2021, telecommunication company TIGO Tanzania was called to testify against the country’s main opposition leader, Freeman Mbowe, during a trial in which the government accused Mbowe of plotting acts of terror. Mbowe and his supporters, meanwhile, have claimed that the trial was politically motivated. When brought to the stand and asked about TIGO’s approach to government demands for user information, the company representative admitted that “compliance with authorities is a higher priority to them than customers’ privacy.”
Wakesho Kililo is the Digital Rights Coordinator for the Greater Internet Freedom Consortium, where she focuses on the Africa region. She observed the testimony unfolding in Tanzania and noted an all too familiar attitude from telecommunications companies across the continent. In East Africa, telecommunications companies have been called out by civil society for their broad and often vague privacy policies, including recently in Uganda. Wakesho hoped that organizations in other parts of the continent could be persuaded to do the same.
Empowering Digital Rights Activists in Central and Southern Africa
It is in this context that RDR partnered with the Internet Freedom Project Lesotho as well as with Paradigm Initiative (PIN), under the auspices of the Greater Internet Freedom Consortium, to support breakthrough new research about the human rights risks posed by local technology companies, through studies carried out in Lesotho, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the Central African Republic (CAR). Both organizations used a selection of indicators from RDR’s 2020 Corporate Accountability Index methodology to evaluate the policies and human rights commitments of digital services and telecommunications companies operating in those four countries.
Paradigm Initiative, a leading civil society organization protecting digital rights across the African continent, focused on three telecommunications companies, one for each country they covered: Unitel in Angola, and two subsidiaries of Orange operating in DRC and CAR. PIN’s goal in completing their report was to help digital rights advocates and researchers in Central and Southern Africa understand existing gaps in company policies and determine on what issues companies need to be pressured to improve.
In Angola, Unitel is the largest mobile operator, with a market share of 80%. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a laissez-faire approach to the oversight of the telecommunications sector has led to increased market consolidation. After Orange RDC acquired its local subsidiary Tigo in 2016, the company increased its market share to almost 28%. As for the Central African Republic, infrastructure development by telecom operators has been low. With mobile internet penetration at only 27%, the largest operator is Telecel, a subsidiary of Econet Wireless, followed by Orange.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, telecommunications companies have come under particularly strong criticism for the poor quality of their services and high prices. In July 2020, an Orange RDC user submitted a complaint against the company for infringing on his right to freedom of expression and information because of the obstacles he faced in trying to use data packages he had already acquired and activated. Orange subsidiaries in both DRC and CAR fail to adequately disclose information about the enforcement of their terms of service and don’t publish any information about network management practices. Operators across all three countries were found to have policies and terms of services that provided insufficient protection to users against digital rights violations.
Strengthening Lesotho’s Weak Digital Rights Culture
Lesotho is a small landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. As the authors of Internet Freedom Project Lesotho’s report point out, this means that its human rights culture is strongly influenced by that of surrounding countries. In the case of Lesotho, a “weak human rights culture has resulted in a poor digital rights culture,” according to the report. To make its case, the organization evaluated four technology companies operating inside the country—two telecommunications providers and two financial companies, covering seven services in total. This marks the first time that RDR’s methodology has been used to study services like mobile wallets and online lending, and the first time it’s been used to evaluate financial companies.
People in Lesotho access the internet primarily through mobile prepaid services, as fixed-line broadband penetration is at only 0.2%, much lower than the average of those countries evaluated by PIN. The telecom market is dominated by two main players, who are the focus of the study: Vodacom and Econet. Vodacom Lesotho is a subsidiary of Vodacom Group, based in South Africa (and owned by UK company Vodafone, one of the companies ranked in the RDR Index). Econet Lesotho is a subsidiary of Econet Wireless, operated by Econet Global, based in South Africa. The report also covered two financial companies: Standard Lesotho Bank, a subsidiary of Standard Bank Group, based in South Africa, and Express Credit, a tech company based in Lesotho.
The report found a stark gap between foreign-owned international companies and local ones when it comes to company-wide human rights commitments. Of the four companies evaluated, only those operated by international companies Vodafone Group and Standard Bank Group have human rights policies in place. Although six of the seven services studied have terms of services, they are mostly published in English, making them inaccessible to a majority of the population that speaks Sesotho (the only exception is Vodacom).
The report’s findings on right to privacy were no less encouraging. Fortunately, four out of the seven services do have privacy policies in place. Yet among these companies, many disclose far too little about both what data is collected and how it’s used. For example, none of the companies disclose how they respond to government demands for user information, including from non-judicial procedures or those received from foreign jurisdictions. Vodacom’s parent company, Vodafone, publishes transparency reports with information about their response to government demands, including in Lesotho, but this is not made available on the Vodacom Lesotho website.
Finally, none of the companies evaluated shared any disclosures about their processes for responding to government demands to restrict content or accounts, or about government demands to shut down a network or restrict access to a service. They also failed to commit to net neutrality principles, and provided no explanations about whether they engage in zero-rating practices. “The findings are reflective of the human rights situation in the country. The country has… an entrenched culture of administrative secrecy,” Nthabiseng Pule, the report’s author, explained.
Looking Ahead
The Internet Freedom Project Lesotho hopes that their work will influence regulatory authorities, such as the Lesotho Communications Authority, to better enforce existing protections for users. Meanwhile, PIN hopes that their research will help raise awareness among civil society organizations. To this end, the study’s researchers prepared an advocacy toolkit to help organizations conduct advocacy using their results. Meanwhile, it is clear from both studies that large multinational parent companies, such as Vodafone and Orange, need to be held accountable for ensuring that their subsidiaries make the same commitments on privacy and freedom of expression as their parent companies do for customers in Europe. Most importantly, these studies have highlighted the need for much stronger commitments from companies throughout Central and Southern Africa to respect human rights and avoid contributing to worsening censorship and political turmoil.
These reports join a growing collection of research projects that have adapted our methodology. You can browse all the other adaptations that have been published to date from across the world.
If you’re interested in carrying out your own research using our methods and standards, we want to hear from you! Write to us at partnerships@rankingdigitalrights.org.
