Former Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, has urged technology companies to take primary responsibility for protecting children from online dangers, warning against shifting the burden of managing digital risks to young users and their parents.
Osinbajo made the call in Cairo, Egypt, while chairing a high-level session on child rights and design accountability in the digital age at the 16th Annual Conference of the Pan African Lawyers Union (PALU).
The session, titled “Guardrails, Not Gates: Protecting Children in the Digital Age,” was convened by the Justice Research Institute (JRI) in collaboration with the African Alliance for People-Centred Justice, with support from Luminate.
The former vice president, who is also a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), said digital products should be designed with safeguards that protect children from harm rather than creating dangerous environments and expecting families to deal with the consequences.
“We cannot build digital environments in which the risks are engineered into the product and then expect children and parents to carry the responsibility for managing those risks,” Osinbajo said.
He stressed that the goal was not to deny children access to technology but to ensure that digital platforms and products were developed in ways that protected their safety, dignity and development.
“The objective is not to build gates that exclude children from technology. It is to establish guardrails that ensure technology works for children rather than exploiting their vulnerabilities,” he added.
Osinbajo said Africa must adopt an approach that balances innovation with rights and accountability as technology and artificial intelligence increasingly shape the lives of young people.
The session examined who should be held accountable when digital products and AI systems expose children to exploitation, manipulation, harmful content, excessive data collection and other online dangers.
Lawyers, judges, regulators, policymakers and child-rights advocates from across Africa also considered six proposed pillars of the draft Cairo Declaration on Child Rights and Design Accountability in the Digital Age.
The proposed principles include safety-by-design obligations for digital platforms used by children, a ban on exploitative targeting and manipulative practices, age-appropriate design codes, algorithmic accountability and transparency, children’s data protection and privacy-preserving age assurance mechanisms.
Director of People-Centred Justice at JRI, Mrs Foluso Idumu-Shado, said the initiative was aimed at ensuring that African countries move beyond merely reacting to online harms.
“Children in Africa are entering a digital environment largely designed elsewhere. We must ensure that African children are not merely protected from the consequences of technology but that their rights and interests are considered in how digital technologies are designed, deployed and regulated,” she said.
Idumu-Shado added that a people-centred approach to digital regulation must be guided by a fundamental question: whether the digital environment serves the best interests of the child.
She said where technology failed that test, the law should compel those who design and profit from digital systems to make changes.
At the end of the deliberations, a consolidated draft of the Cairo Declaration, reflecting the priorities and proposed amendments of delegates, was presented to the PALU leadership for consideration and further action.
The initiative also proposes model legal and regulatory instruments that African countries, data protection authorities and other regulators can adapt to strengthen the protection of children in the digital space.
