Where Do I Start? Sandboxing for Data Protection Teams

A working session on real applications, real challenges, and where to begin

Across Africa, Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) are increasingly tasked with governing rapidly evolving digital ecosystems marked by cross-border data flows, emerging technologies, and complex public-private data infrastructures. Traditional regulatory approaches alone are often insufficient to anticipate risks, test safeguards, or evaluate new models before deployment. This is why a growing number of DPAs globally are developing and running regulatory sandboxes: structured, supervised environments where regulators can experiment, collaborate, and generate evidence to inform adaptive governance.

African regulators are also actively looking into sandboxes, exploring whether the challenges they face can genuinely be addressed through this approach and assessing its financial, institutional, and legal feasibility. Done well, sandboxes give DPAs a practical way to navigate these complexities, testing how data protection applies to new technologies and data flows in a controlled setting. In doing so, they allow DPAs to move beyond a strictly protective posture toward one that also enables responsible innovation, without compromising their core mandate to protect data subjects.

The Datasphere Initiative supports regulators in building the knowledge, tools, and networks needed to design and run sandboxes effectively. As part of the Africa Sandboxes Forum, we invite you to register for this virtual peer learning session tailored for African DPAs and data protection teams seeking practical tools, frameworks, and knowledge exchange to strengthen their regulatory innovation capacity.

Purpose and Objectives

The session aims to help data protection teams understand where to start with regulatory sandboxes and how to get the most out of them. Specifically, it will:

• Introduce sandboxing in data protection: how sandboxes complement existing compliance approaches and help DPAs engage innovators, test requirements in practice, and generate evidence for guidance and decisions.
• Share practitioner experiences from establishing and running a data protection sandbox, including challenges, risks, and lessons relevant to African DPAs.
• Facilitate a peer exchange on the opportunities and considerations for sandboxing in participants’ own contexts.

Session Details

Date: Thursday, 10 December 2026

Time: 14:00–15:30 CET (13:00 GMT / 14:00 WAT / 15:00 CAT·SAST / 16:00 EAT)

Format: Virtual

Audience: African Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) and the wider community working on data protection across Africa, including regulators, policymakers, privacy professionals, researchers, civil society and innovators. 

Register here.

What to expect

The webinar will be highly interactive, creating space for DPAs to share their experiences, challenges and questions. Thought-provoking speakers will help frame the conversation and stimulate discussion, with an emphasis on peer exchange and collective learning rather than one-way content delivery. Participants will also have an opportunity to connect with fellow DPAs across the continent, exchange perspectives and build relationships around shared interests and experiences in sandboxing.