Digital repression in the Education sector: A framework for strategic prevention

• In Event: Envisioning Education in a Digital Society: A Focus on Digital Repression in Conflict-Affected Settings

Proposal

Digital Repression in the education sector affects all sectors, ranging from agriculture and food security to global health. Building on the findings of the 2021 Democratizing Digital Landscape Assessment, which suggested that donors have an important opportunity to further integrate awareness of digital repression into its programming. A follow-on study in 2022 illustrated a digital development portfolio mapping of the education sector showed that digital repression safeguards are underrepresented. This finding underscores the importance of countering and mitigating the five digital repression tactics across education programming in sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly in conflict-affected settings where repression takes many forms. The paper will explore the Educational technology (edtech) tools that are growing rapidly across donor agencies and partner countries' responses. Accordingly, a recent UNICEF research piece identified over 1000 digital personalized learning products in use across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We investigate Edtech’s benefits and find a range of interventions from facilitating distance learning for students who are unable to attend school in-person to cultivating sought-after job skills among out-of-school youth. While digital tools can help children and youth acquire the education and skills needed to become productive members of society, they also present important digital risks, including new opportunities for digital repression. Identifying and mitigating the potential for digital repression across USAID’s education portfolio helps protect the safety and integrity of educators, learners, and parents while promoting open, inclusive, and secure digital ecosystems. In turn, each repression tactic is discussed, including : censorship, surveillance, digitally enabled targeted persecution, social manipulation and disinformation and Internet shutdown. As such Censorship is “The suppression of free speech by governments or private institutions based on these key areas are an assumption that said speech is objectionable or offensive.” (Landscape Assessment). Surveillance – “The use of devices, technologies, and software to monitor the activities of someone.” (Tanzania DECA).Digitally enabled targeted persecution – “Harassment, trolls and digital attacks specifically targeting a group of online users because of their opinions.” (Tanzania DECA). Social manipulation and disinformation – “Disinformation is false information that is deliberately created or disseminated with the express purpose to cause harm.” Internet shutdowns – “Intentionally makes the internet inaccessible or unavailable for a specific population, location, or mode of access, often to control the flow of information.” (Tanzania DECA) - A discussion of a framework for analysis of these five areas of digital repression is presented and applied to countries under political repression and violence in West Africa.

Author

• Wendy Smith, Independent Consultant