There’s a pattern so familiar it should set off alarm bells across every capital in Africa. A foreign power identifies valuable raw materials within our borders, extracts them with minimal compensation, processes them abroad, then sells finished products back to us at prices we can barely afford.
We’ve seen this with gold, copper, coltan and coffee. Now it’s happening with something far more valuable: our data.
On December 4, Kenya signed two agreements with the United States: a Health Cooperation Framework and a Data Sharing Agreement. Uganda and Rwanda have signed similar arrangements. These grant US officials real-time access to national health databases and require rapid sharing of disease specimens and genetic data with American research institutions.
Kenya committed to seven years of data sharing and escalating co-investment reaching Sh50 billion annually by 2030. In exchange, we receive declining US funding and infrastructure support, but nowhere are there guarantees of preferential access to vaccines or diagnostics developed from our own pathogens. Any medical countermeasures developed will prioritise US needs first, with Kenyan access at commercial rates.
The asymmetry is built into the title itself. These are “America First” agreements that explicitly prioritise US interests. When American needs come first and Kenyan access comes at commercial rates, we’re not partners, we’re suppliers in an extraction economy.
Profits accumulate elsewhere
The government claims these agreements will go to Parliament for approval. This is constitutional theatre. As lawyer Willis Otieno explains, MoUs between governments are executive understandings, not subject to the Treaty-Making and Ratification Act's process. By structuring these as MoUs, the government created a loophole: they can claim parliamentary involvement while the document’s legal structure ensures Parliament has no binding authority.
But when an MoU involves sharing Kenyan citizens’ health data with a foreign government, it is no longer simple technical cooperation. It touches sovereignty, privacy, national security and constitutional rights. Kenyan health records qualify as sensitive personal data under the Data Protection Act, 2019. Under the law, such data cannot be shared with foreign governments without explicit legal basis, purpose limitation, consent, protection safeguards and approval by the Data Protection Commissioner. No MoU can override Kenyan statutes.
If the MoU circumvents Parliament on matters touching citizen data, it violates Article 31 of the Constitution, which protects privacy, personal data and health information. Sharing national health records with a foreign power requires full treaty ratification precisely because it involves constitutional rights of millions of Kenyans who never consented.
The Data Sharing Agreement states that Kenyan law prevails over US federal law in data matters. Kenya retains ownership of data and intellectual property rights. But there are zero guarantees of technology transfer, no co-ownership of intellectual property from Kenyan biological materials, no preferential pricing. Benefits-sharing is deferred to future “subsidiary agreements” . We’ll be seven years into data sharing before securing what we get in return.
This is what scholars call “data colonialism”. African countries detect diseases, collect specimens, sequence pathogens. American institutions transform this into billion-dollar products, then sell them back to African markets at prices set by patent holders. Value addition happens elsewhere; profits accumulate elsewhere.
The incentive structure reveals the trap. As one community health researcher told me, community health promoters are constantly reminded that “more data, more funding”. This creates perverse incentives, where frontline workers maximise data extraction to maintain funding flows, while the communities generating this data see no proportional benefits from the products developed.
The US will invest in Kenya’s laboratory capacity and digital health systems—real benefits. But these systems will be interoperable with US platforms, built to American standards, generating data flowing seamlessly into US-controlled databases. We’re building roads ensuring our most valuable 21st-century resource travels in one direction while creating dependencies and making future pivots extraordinarily costly.
Zimbabwe, speaking for 51 African nations, supports a multilateral pathogen-sharing system through the World Health Organization, ensuring countries benefit equitably. This points to what Africa must demand: digital sovereignty—the ability to control digital infrastructure, regulate data flows and govern platforms according to our own laws and interests.
This means concrete demands. First, these agreements must be submitted to Parliament, because they involve constitutional rights to privacy and data protection. Second, the Office of Data Protection Commissioner must conduct and publish a Data Protection Impact Assessment before any citizen health data flows to foreign entities. Third, genuine public participation before agreements are signed, not performative consultations afterward.
Fourth, county government consultation since health is devolved. Fifth, any data-sharing arrangement must guarantee proportional benefits: preferential access to products developed from African data, technology transfer to produce them locally, and co-ownership of intellectual property. Sixth, data processing and analysis capacity must be built in Africa, not just data collection.
Africa stands at a crossroads. We can allow data colonialism to replicate extractive patterns of the past or insist on equitable partnerships where our data sovereignty is respected.
The writer is a whistleblower, strategy consultant and startup mentor. www.nelsonamenya.com
