Two senior leaders from the Gates Foundation’s Africa team, Matshidiso Masire and Bahati Ngongo, visited the Policy Innovation Lab at Stellenbosch University to explore how the Foundation’s catalytic funding is unlocking further investment and impact. The visit also examined how the supported work is enabling practical learning between countries in the Global South.
Digital public infrastructure and South-South learning
The Lab’s work on Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), undertaken in close collaboration with Stellenbosch University’s Faculty of Law, provides a direct example of practical learning across the Global South.
A key output is a functional regulatory model for DPI implementation in South Africa, developed by Stellenbosch University’s Prof Geo Quinot in support of the country’s Digital Transformation Roadmap. The model shifts regulatory analysis away from a static inventory of legal instruments towards three functional pillars: cross-cutting principles, operational provisions for building and maintaining systems, and service provisions governing citizen-facing interactions. These pillars better reflect how DPI is designed and used in practice. The approach marks a shift from passive legal observation to active legal engineering, treating law as a manageable component of infrastructure.
The model is also designed with regional integration in mind. As highlighted by Ms Zinhle Novazi, African DPI integration depends on continental instruments such as the African Union Data Policy Framework, the Malabo Convention, and the AfCFTA Protocol on Digital Trade. The analysis shows that, even before full continental harmonisation, domestic data protection laws across Africa share sufficient common ground, much of it derived from EU frameworks, to enable de facto interoperability. Cross-border DPI transactions between South Africa and Nigeria, for example, can already be structured lawfully under POPIA and the Nigeria Data Protection Act of 2023. This suggests that regional DPI functionality is immediately achievable, rather than dependent on lengthy ratification processes.
A two-day sandbox workshop in January, co-hosted with the TUM Think Tank and the Global Network of Internet and Society Centres, brought together senior officials from the South African Presidency, National Treasury, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies, and the Information Regulator, alongside practitioners from Brazil, Colombia, Rwanda, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. One outcome is a forthcoming sandbox playbook tailored for policymakers in the Global South working in resource-constrained contexts.
Artificial intelligence for policymaking
A clear example of the Foundation’s catalytic funding is the Lab’s AI4Policy platform. Built around the policy cycle of African governments, the platform includes tools to detect citizen sentiment in near real time, synthesise academic evidence into policy briefs, coordinate departmental planning, and retrieve treaty information through natural language queries.
The Foundation’s initial investment has helped unlock further partnerships, including with a global technology company. Expansion of the platform’s beta use case is now under way, alongside collaboration with industry to develop advanced AI tools for policymaking. The platform’s architecture is being designed for deployment across five African countries, enabling governments to adapt the tools to their own contexts rather than build from scratch.
A second application, the Identifying Barriers to Investment Tool (iBIT), was piloted with The Presidency and Wesgro in the Western Cape. iBIT is an AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot that allows businesses to report specific policy barriers to investment. The pilot identified significant investment being held back by policy uncertainty and regulatory friction. Plans are now in place for a national rollout, informed directly by the pilot’s findings.
A separate session with Prof Francesco Petruccione, Stellenbosch University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for AI, explored how this work feeds into the University’s emerging applied AI programme. The Foundation’s grant is therefore no longer supporting isolated outputs, but is contributing to long-term institutional capability.
Impact through social innovation
Bringing these strands together, the South Africa Goalkeepers network is coordinated through the Lab’s SDG/2063 Impact Hub as the national node of the Foundation’s global Goalkeepers programme. The network provides a platform through which DPI and AI tools developed in South Africa can support tracking progress against the SDGs and Agenda 2063 across the continent.
The visit concluded with a discussion on next steps. For the Foundation, the central test remains consistent: whether its investments unlock further funding and whether supported work extends beyond a single country. On both measures, the partnership with Stellenbosch is delivering on its original intent. The focus is now shifting from what has been achieved to how this work can be scaled and extended further.
* This article was drafted using human expertise supported by AI-assisted writing tools.
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