Stop shifting online safety burden to children and parents, Osinbajo says

Yemi Osinbajo says technology companies should stop designing digital products with built-in risks and then leaving children and parents to manage the consequences.

The former Nigerian vice-president made the remarks in Cairo while chairing a session on child rights and design accountability at the 16th Annual Conference of the Pan African Lawyers Union. The session, titled “Guardrails, Not Gates: Protecting Children in the Digital Age,” was convened by the Justice Research Institute with the African Alliance for People-Centred Justice and support from Luminate.

“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.

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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.

He called for an African approach that combines rights, accountability and innovation. The aim, he said, should not be to exclude children from technology, but to ensure that digital spaces protect 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.”

Lawyers, judges, regulators, policymakers and child-rights advocates from across Africa discussed responsibility when digital products and artificial intelligence systems expose children to exploitation, manipulation, harmful content or excessive data collection. They reviewed six proposed pillars of a draft Cairo Declaration, including safety-by-design obligations, bans on exploitative targeting, age-appropriate design codes, algorithmic transparency, children’s data protection and privacy-respecting age assurance mechanisms.

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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.