As part of the Africa Sandboxes Forum, the Datasphere Initiative, in collaboration with the Alliance for Regulatory Innovation, will organize a webinar on 29 September 2026 to explore how data can be better accessed, shared, and used to support more inclusive and evidence-based policymaking across Africa, with a particular focus on gender-disaggregated data and opportunities for local impact.
Despite growing recognition of the value of gender data for inclusive policymaking, significant challenges remain in its availability, accessibility, sharing, interoperability, and use. Across Africa, gender data is often available in some form but does not necessarily reach the people, institutions, and decision-making processes where it can inform policy and drive change. The challenge is therefore not only generating more gender-disaggregated data, but ensuring it can move from collection to meaningful use in addressing concrete policy and development challenges.
This creates an opportunity to explore new data-sharing infrastructure and collaboration tools, including the potential role of operational sandboxes. These can provide controlled environments to test data-sharing, governance, and technical approaches, while developing practical solutions to specific policy and societal challenges. The session will explore where such approaches can help overcome barriers to data access and collaboration.
The webinar will bring together subject matter experts from diverse backgrounds including practitioners from development agencies, academia, government agencies, research institutions, civil society, data practitioners, and gender-focused organizations to explore challenges in accessing and using gender-disaggregated data, examine how new data-sharing and collaboration infrastructures can enable experimentation, and identify concrete use cases for local impact and gender inclusion. Registration is through this link.
