As digital identity infrastructures become central to state-building and digital sovereignty
agendas across Africa, national strategies increasingly position digital ID as a foundation for inclusion, service delivery, and economic participation. Yet across East Africa, grassroots evidence shows that sovereignty is being constructed about communities rather than with them, resulting in persistent forms of administrative exclusion, opaque decision-making, and limited accountability over data practices. This panel asks how digital
sovereignty is experienced, contested, and renegotiated from below when identity systems become prerequisites for recognition, mobility, and access to public goods. Drawing on
field-based perspectives from civil society and community advocates, the discussion
examines:
(1) how design and roll-out processes create new forms of “governance without consent”;
(2) the accountability gap between policy promise and front-line implementation; and
(3) community-led mechanisms for rights-claiming, transparency, and oversight. By comparing Kenya ( Maisha Namba), Uganda (Ndaga Muntu), and Tanzania’s NIDA
reforms, the session situates digital ID politics within broader questions of digital sovereignty,
infrastructure governance, and citizen–state trust. It aims to move the debate beyond abstract
legal frameworks toward grounded accountability mechanisms that enable meaningful
participation at the point where people interface with the state through data.