After Uganda’s ruling, companies operating in Africa face a new era of data accountability

When Uganda’s Personal Data Protection Office announced in July that a major global platform, Google, had breached the country’s data protection law, the news briefly drew international notice. It was a rare instance of a relatively young African regulator confronting a global technology company over the handling of local citizens’ information. But the true significance of the ruling reaches far beyond the company implicated in the case. What matters now is the precedent it sets for every organisation, foreign or domestic, that collects or processes African user data.

The dispute that triggered the ruling began when several Ugandan citizens challenged how their personal information was being handled. Their claim rested on the country’s Data Protection and Privacy Act, which requires any entity collecting or processing the data of Ugandan citizens to register with the regulator and to ensure that any cross-border transfers meet standards equivalent to those provided for locally. The regulator agreed with that interpretation and underscored a principle that many companies have been slow to absorb: the law applies not only to those with a physical presence in the country but to anyone, inside or outside its borders, who determines how Ugandan data is processed.

What might once have seemed a narrow procedural matter has become a defining feature of Africa’s digital governance landscape. Regulators across the continent are steadily building the legal and institutional machinery needed to oversee companies whose services reach far beyond national boundaries. South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana and Rwanda have all adopted legislation with extra-territorial reach. Many of their regulators now wield powers to impose administrative fines or binding corrective measures. Whether a company maintains an office on the continent is no longer the determinant of its obligations. If it touches the data of citizens protected by national law, it is expected to comply.

And compliance now carries real expectations. Registration requirements, once dismissed as bureaucratic, are being recast as basic tools of transparency. Documentation of cross-border data flows is no longer a courtesy but a legal necessity. Companies must be able to explain why they collect certain information, how that information is processed, and what safeguards accompany it as it travels across jurisdictions. Governments are treating these obligations not as formalities but as prerequisites for public trust, particularly in environments where data moves rapidly and often invisibly.

For firms operating cloud platforms, telecommunications networks, financial technologies, digital advertising systems or consumer applications, this moment marks a fundamental change. They must know where user data travels, on what legal basis it is processed and which country ultimately stores it. They must demonstrate that their safeguards are equivalent to local protections and that users have been meaningfully informed about what happens to their personal information. Questions that once sat at the edge of compliance discussions are now central.

There are calls to strengthen Uganda’s Data Protection and Privacy Act are growing. Expanding the powers of the regulator to issue fines and enforce its decisions would align the country with regional standards and give meaningful effect to citizens’ rights. Without such reforms, Uganda risks maintaining a regulatory framework whose ambitions exceed its tools.

Even without new legislation, however, the direction of travel is unmistakable. Companies operating in Africa’s digital markets must prepare for closer scrutiny and greater demands for transparency. The days when firms could rely on geographical distance or technical opacity to shield themselves from local regulation are quickly disappearing. The case that brought this issue to light may have featured a household-name technology company, but the lesson it offers is universal. Any organisation that handles African user data will be held to the standards of African law, whether or not it chooses to see itself as part of the region’s digital ecosystem.

In the years ahead, the central question will not be whether regulators have the authority to assert jurisdiction, but whether companies are prepared to adjust their practices to meet it. For firms working in or reaching into African markets, this is no longer an abstract compliance discussion. It is a strategic decision about how to operate in a regulatory environment that is becoming more confident, more coordinated and more insistent on transparency. Companies that move early, by mapping their data flows, reviewing the legal basis for every layer of processing, strengthening their internal compliance teams and opening real channels of communication with regulators, will be the ones able to grow without interruption. They will shape the norms that govern their industries rather than merely react to them, and they will build the kind of trust that regulators increasingly expect from global actors.

Those that hold back, waiting for court cases or formal penalties before taking the law seriously, may discover that the next ruling leaves them with little room to maneuver. By the time scrutiny arrives, the argument that “we didn’t know” will no longer carry weight, and the cost of retrofitting compliance into complex, global systems will be far higher than the cost of preparing for it now.