On 8 March 2023 at 20:30 (UTC+8), the UNU International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH) will organise the webinar “The Personal is Political: Re-imagining Data Governance in the Context of Digital Health”. The event will focus on data governance and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) in the context of a rapidly evolving digital health industry, and privacy and data protection legislation that is struggling to keep up.
While digital technology has the potential to revolutionise healthcare, it can also exacerbate gender inequalities, deepen marginalisation, and enable human rights violations. In a world where physical and digital identities are increasingly intertwined, bodily autonomy must include control over personal data. However, this remains elusive to women, girls, and those identifying as other genders, especially in low- and middle-income countries.
The webinar will articulate how to:
- emphasise existing inequalities between different data subjects and specify in a more systematic and consolidated way that the exercise of data rights is conditioned by many factors such as health, age, gender or social status (Malgieri and Niklas, 2020, p. 2).
- promote the widest possible public debate on the development of big data technologies and personal data protection regulations, even questioning its conceptual foundations.
- work with public institutions to support this debate by providing mechanisms of transparency, external control and accountability of big data technologies and data-driven corporations.
Speakers:
- Pascale Allotey, Director, SRH/HRP, WHO
- Eszter Kismödi, Chief Executive, SRHM
- Anja Kovacs, Founding Partner, Feminist Futures, India
- Nerima Were, Acting Director, KELIN Institute, Kenya
- Rui Zhou, Innovation Manager, UNICEF
- Rajat Khosla, Director, UNU-IIGH
- Sagri Singh, Chief, Gender and Health, UNU-IIGH
Please register HERE.