Algorithms, Data Justice, and Social Protection in the Global South: DRIF 2025 Dialogues Between Latin America and Africa

DRIF 2025

The rapid digitization of social protection systems across the Global South offers both promise and peril. Governments in countries like Brazil and Kenya are increasingly turning to algorithms and digital ID systems to streamline welfare services. While this technological shift can improve access and efficiency, it also risks reinforcing the very social and economic inequities these systems aim to address.

This blog, drawing on a session at DRIF 2025 with Clarice Tavares, Mariana Rielli, and Shamira Ahmed, explores how digital social protection systems in Latin America and Africa are shaped by gendered surveillance, corporate influence, and gaps in governance—and outlines pathways toward just data data value creation (JDVC) and South-South and Triangular Cooperation (SSC and TrC).

Digital Welfare Systems: A Double-Edged Sword

Digital welfare systems promise speed and scale. But they also risk simplifying complex social realities into data points. In Brazil, the Castro Único enabled over 57 million people to receive COVID-19 emergency support through an AI-powered platform —Yet, as Tavares explained, “Automated systems like Bolsa Família treat poverty as a gender-neutral condition, overlooking the caregiving responsibilities often shouldered by women and often define economic vulnerability.”

Indeed, while 92% of Bolsa Família recipients are women, the system’s algorithmic logic fails to capture intersecting inequalities related to race, location, and gender.

Similar patterns were observed in Togo’s Novissi program, which used mobile phone data and machine learning to allocate emergency cash transfers. Despite higher poverty rates in rural areas, 57% of beneficiaries were urban, demonstrating how technical “efficiency” can reinforce exclusion.

These concerns echo the warning from the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, who cautioned against a “digital welfare dystopia” in which automation is deployed without adequate safeguards for rights and accountability.

Algorithms and Accountability: Who Holds the Power?

There is growing recognition that social protection systems increasingly rely on algorithms and data infrastructures developed, maintained, or managed by private technology companies, raising concerns about transparency, accountability, and the commodification of personal data.

Tavares highlighted, “Women in Bolsa Família face a privacy paradox. To receive essential benefits, they must disclose intimate personal data to a state apparatus that can later use this data to surveil or penalize them.”

Another Latin American example is Brazil’s Cadastro Único , although the initiative supported collecting data on nearly 40% of the population, the system still lacks meaningful consent processes, especially for Black and Indigenous women, who are disproportionately exposed to profiling and bureaucratic harm.

However, Latin America’s longer history with digital registries has led to some reforms, for example, Colombia has introduced algorithmic audits to identify and correct biases. But Rielli warned that, "Fragmented digital ecosystems in countries like Brazil still allow foreign tech firms to harvest data without sufficient local oversight or benefit-sharing. "

Similarly, African examples, such as Ghana’s e-Zwich credit scoring tool, while expanding financial access, has faced criticism for its lack of transparency in determining eligibility—particularly affecting women, who make up the majority of the region’s unbanked population.

Kenya’s biometric ID system Huduma Namba excluded 38% of rural residents due to structural and logistical barriers. Ahmed noted, “These systems often prioritize administrative efficiency over equity, centralizing control in opaque algorithms. We need responsible governance frameworks that mandate transparency, inclusiveness, and redress.”

Advancing Data Justice: More Than Privacy

Data justice initiatives must go beyond privacy protections and data localization. We must ask: Who controls the data? Who benefits from it? And how are communities involved in decisions that shape their lives?

As Rielli noted, “Justice can’t be reduced to technical fixes. It requires inclusive, democratic processes where communities help define how data is collected, shared, and used.”

Ahmed also emphasized in addition to JDVC, data governance approches must also confront corporate capture. In Africa, while there are significant foreign investments to facilitate the digital economy, the focus is often on connectivity and services that serve the interests of multinational corporations, with piecemeal contributions to public infrastructure or workforce development, “We need to rebalance power dynamics so that the value generated from marginalized communities benefits local ecosystems—not just distant shareholders,” she asserts.

Resistance, Reform, and Reclaiming Data Justice

Civil society and grassroots movements across both regions are pushing back. In Chile, advocacy groups succeeded in securing transparency in predictive policing algorithms—a model now being adapted for welfare monitoring. Ghana’s post-pandemic audits of e-Zwich led to the introduction of USSD-based services to reach offline populations.

Tavares stressed that “Digital inclusion must be rooted in enforceable grievance mechanisms and locally grounded designs. Accountability cannot be an afterthought.”

Brazil’s vibrant media collectives and Indigenous knowledge networks have also been critical in challenging the dominant narratives of poverty and exclusion—InternetLab’s promotion of open-source platforms for welfare services is one such example of reclaiming technological sovereignty.

South-South and Triangular Cooperation: A Path for Building Equitable Digital Futures for the Global South

South-South and Triangular Cooperation (SSC and TrC) could offer a transformative path forward to power the Global South’s digital future— Facilitating the exchange of ideas, technologies, and governance frameworks between countries that share similar structural challenge, outside of Western-dominated world views and sociotechnical imaginaries.

Bangladesh’s a2i initiative, which established thousands of rural digital centers, has been successfully adapted in countries like Bhutan and the Maldives. India’s Unified Payments Interface has informed Ghana’s e-Zwich and Kenya’s M-Pesa—proving that SSC can drive context-relevant innovation.

“SSC isn’t just about replicating tools,” said Ahmed. “It’s about shifting power by putting Global South experiences, knowledge, and priorities at the center of the digital economy.”

Technology Guided by Justice

Ultimately, digital tools alone cannot deliver sustainable digital transformation. As Ahmed concludes, "Multilateral reform for the Global South is particularly crucial in the development of AI Governance and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), where private platforms and Western Ministries  are increasingly embedded into developing policies, institutions, and ecosystems to facilitate public welfare systems in the Global South."

The shared experiences of Latin America and Africa—marked by innovation, resistance, and solidarity, based on contextual realities—offer critical insights for designing digital welfare systems that empower rather than exclude.