Global South's Data-Colonialism Paradox

Last October, Blessing Adebayo, a small cosmetics seller in Lagos, received an e-mail from Amazon Web Services: her customers’ data would henceforth be stored in Ireland. “I thought my files lived in my own shop,” she told me. “Suddenly they’re in a cold room 6,000 kilometres away, and I have to pay dollars to reach them.”

Blessing’s complaint is a miniature of a much larger shift. Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, governments are discovering that the data their citizens produce—location histories, health records, shopping lists—are quietly shipped to server farms in Silicon Valley, Dublin or Shanghai, where they are refined into the algorithms that now shape what people watch, buy and even whom they vote for. The profits stay north; the raw material is mined south. A new colonial pipeline has been built, only this time the cargo is digital.

How Much is Leaving?

The UNCTAD Digital Economy Report 2024 calculates that developing countries attract less than 30% of global foreign investment in digital sectors, while 80% of projects are crowded into just 10 economies. In other words, the value created from Nigerian clicks or Indonesian swipes is booked as GDP (gross domestic product) in California.

Nigeria has started to push back. In March 2024, the communications regulator gave Google, Microsoft and Amazon six months to build local data centres or face service restrictions. “We told them no more waivers—we need a road map,” says Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, the country’s top digital official. The ultimatum is less about cables and more about sovereignty: if Lagos cannot tax or audit the data, it cannot claim a share of the wealth that data generates.

Chinese firms have laid 70% of Africa’s 4G backbone; Amazon controls roughly half of Latin American cloud contracts. These cables and server halls look like development, but they lock countries into long-term leases. Seventy per cent of Nigerian government agencies still keep their records on overseas clouds, African Development Bank figures show. Moving them home will cost an estimated $1 billion—money that could build 10,000 kilometres of urban water pipes.

India’s 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Act and Vietnam’s 24-month local-storage rule are attempts to claw back control, yet they tackle only geography, not intelligence: the chips, models and engineers that turn raw data into high-value services remain in the Global North. Scholars call the result “sovereignty simulacrum”—flags on a map, but power elsewhere.

Environmental Bill

Southern countries also pay the hidden ecological cost. They export cobalt, lithium and copper at low prices, import expensive phones, and later receive container-loads of e-waste. The circular flow mirrors the old plantation economy: ship out cheap, bring back dear.

Three experiments point a way out. 

1. Regional cloud: The African Union’s draft Data Policy Framework treats member-state data as a pooled strategic asset, big enough to bargain with Big Tech. 

2. Public fibre: Uruguay’s state-owned ANTEL has achieved 94 % broadband coverage while keeping traffic—and profits—inside national borders. 

3. Code with capital: Chile is mapping data-centre heat and water use so that every new server farm must serve national development goals, not just foreign balance sheets.

Bottom Line

Data is not the new oil; it is the new soil. If developing countries cannot grow their own crops—algorithms, services, taxes—someone else will harvest the field. Blessing Adebayo’s tiny shop is a reminder that sovereignty begins with the simplest question: where is my information, and who is making money from it?

The writer, a technology-policy analyst and author, is Additional Personal Assistant to the Speaker of the Kerala Legislative Assembly. The views are personal.