Global Digital Forum in Nizhny Novgorod has become a new platform for knowledge-sharing in the field of e-governance

From June 5 to 6, 2025, experts and partners of the HSE Center for African Studies participated in the Global Digital Forum in Nizhny Novgorod. Andrey Maslov, Director of the Center, moderated the session “Russia-Africa: Cooperation for Digital Sovereignty”. Among the speakers were participants and partners of the e-Governance Knowledge Sharing Programme, including officials from Tanzania, the Republic of the Congo, the Comoros, representatives of Rostelecom and Sberbank.

The session participants discussed common approaches and solutions to ensure the digital sovereignty of African countries, as well as elaborated on the prospects for cooperation.

The African Ministers expressed gratitude to the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation, as well as to Russian Government for organizing the forum. In addition, the African delegates highly appreciated the role of the HSE Center for African Studies in organizing the session on digital sovereignty and noted the contribution of the e-Governance Knowledge Sharing Programme for African officials to the development and strengthening of the Russian-African digital partnership.

“This Forum will undoubtedly strengthen the friendly relations between the leaders of our countries, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Denis Sassou Nguesso. I also believe that it will deepen our cooperation with Russian scientific and educational institutions, such as the HSE University and the Center for African Studies”, – admitted Leon Juste Ibombo, Honorable Minister of Posts, Telecommunications, and the Digital Economy of the Republic of Congo. Recently, the Ministry has become one of the partners of the Center: in April 2025, on the sidelines of the GITEX Africa 2025 exhibition in Morocco, Leon Juste Ibombo and Andrey Maslov exchanged copies of the signed agreement on cooperation between the Ministry and the Higher School of Economics. The agreement consolidated the Ministry’s participation in the e-Governance Knowledge Sharing Programme for African officials, which has been implemented since 2022 with the support of the Russian Government, Administration of the Russian Federation, and Innopraktika company.

During the session, Andrey Maslov spoke about plans to develop the Programme, highlighting its key goals: strengthening African digital sovereignty, promoting capacity building and human capital development. Together with digital infrastructure development, these are the most crucial challenges faced by African countries in digital field.

The topic of digital sovereignty was further developed by Muguti Tafadzwa, Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe: “One of the challenges we have to face is our lack of information sovereignty. The stories of many African countries are rold instead of us, with many distortions. It is a practical issue that needs to be addressed in a complex way, by intergovernmental communication and data-investments as well, and I am happy that we are now working very closely on it at the presidential and intergovernmental levels”.

“Most African countries’ data (on mining resources, for example) is foreign one”, – Muguti Tafadzwa continues. “It is used mainly by Western countries and other powerful nations that come and explore their vast natural resources. But as for Zimbabwe, we want our country to transform, leveraging our data-sovereignty. We’ve developed our National Digitalization Strategy that aims to audit ourselves and identify what are the things that we’ve done wrong in the last decades. We are now striving to implement it on a national level”.

As Andrey Maslov noted, government institutions are playing a leading role when it comes to data sovereignty. And African countries demonstrate this quite clearly:  “In Tanzania, the role of the government is predominant when we talk about our digital transformation, but it tightly aligns with other stakeholders as well (private sector, civil society, international and local organizations)”, – said Jerry William Silaa, Honorable Minister of Communication and Information Technology of Tanzania.

Another question that can’t be ignored is digital education. “In Comoros, for example, the government has done a great work: the country has its own fiber optic factories, and is has also opened its first 5G platform, as well as the first center on ruling in this sphere. The next step is providing digital literacy and skills to the youth since without talented people, data centers won’t be operable enough. In this sense, the Comoros hopes to get Russian experience in digital development since it will make a significant contribution to the country’s development”, – commented Oumouri Mmadi Hassani, Minister of Post, Communications, Digital Economy, and Transparency of Comoros, who is also a graduate of Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University “LETI”.

As for Russian private enterprises, their interest in African region is growing. For example, PJSC Rostelecom, the leader of the Russian telecommunications industry, is opened to cooperation and is ready to share its ICT developments with African partners. Alexey Sapunov, Deputy President and Chairman of the Management Board of Rostelecom, underlined that “the company is interested in eliminating digital inequality and providing high-speed Internet in remote and sparsely populated African regions. Other prospective areas for cooperation include staff training and strengthening information security. Rostelecom is open to cooperation and ready to share its developments with other countries”.

“There are lots of prospects for cooperation between us. From the Russian side, I can say that we are ready to share our experience with African countries in such fields as financial technology, biometrics, and data protection (after all, data in the modern world has become the “new oil,” a critically important resource).  The construction of data centers and GigaChat also deserve special mention. We are open to cooperate both in terms of selling our solutions, discussing financing options and creating IT infrastructure directly in African countries”, – summarized Vladimir Ilyanin, Managing Director for Business Development in Sub-Saharan Africa, Sberbank.