A senior delegation from the Kingsman National Institute (KNI) has returned from a critical and transformative academic workshop in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, hosted by the esteemed Université d’Eastbay. The colloquium, held at the university’s main campus in the Cocody district (BP 2024 Abidjan), brought KNI’s leading researchers from our PPL (Philosophy, Politics & Law) faculty and the Kolonaki Forum for Economic Policy (KFEP) into direct, intensive dialogue with their counterparts in Eastbay’s UFR Sciences Economiques et de Gestion (Faculty of Economics and Management) and UFR Informatique et Sciences du Numérique (Faculty of Computer Science and Digital Sciences).
The workshop was structured to address a profound and accelerating challenge at the intersection of law, economics, and technology: the governance of data in West Africa’s booming digital finance (FinTech) and mobile money ecosystems. The core of the debate focused on the systemic friction between established, rights-based European data frameworks and the urgent, development-focused pragmatism required in one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets.
The KNI delegation, co-led by Professor Zofia Kaczmarek (Jurisprudence) and Dr. Eleni Zografos (International Trade), opened the sessions by presenting KNI’s research on the European experience. This included a rigorous analysis of the GDPR and the forthcoming EU AI Act, which are rooted in KNI’s “Athenian Synthesis” model of “ethics-by-design.” Our faculty presented a framework arguing that robust, individual-centric data rights are a non-negotiable prerequisite for a stable, trustworthy, and sustainable digital economy.
This deeply held, European-centric position was immediately met with a sophisticated and powerful counter-argument from our Ivorian colleagues. The faculty at Université d’Eastbay, whose researchers are conducting on-the-ground analysis of the region’s economic transformation, presented a starkly different, and far more urgent, set of priorities.
Their economists argued that the primary driver in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) is not data privacy, but rapid and mass financial inclusion. They presented compelling data, drawn from their own research, demonstrating how mobile-first FinTech solutions are the only viable pathway for millions of unbanked citizens to access credit, savings, and formal economic participation.
A senior professor from Eastbay’s UFR Informatique noted the “imperfect” fit of KNI’s model. “The KNI framework is philosophically sound for a market that is already banked and digitally saturated. Here, our velocity is different,” he argued. “To impose a rigid, GDPR-style framework at this early stage would not protect our citizens; it would be a form of ‘governance colonialism’ that stifles local innovation and effectively locks the poor out of the new economy. We must prioritize inclusion first.”
This fundamental friction—”Rights-First” (Athens) versus “Inclusion-First” (Abidjan)—did not result in an impasse. Instead, it forced a genuine and necessary synthesis. The Kingsman National Institute delegation acknowledged that their “one-size-fits-all” legal model was theoretically rigid and failed to account for the profound, positive impact of mobile money on human development. In parallel, the Université d’Eastbay team acknowledged the rising long-term risks of unregulated, data-driven credit scoring and the potential for algorithmic bias to create new forms of systemic poverty.
The colloquium concluded with the formation of a joint KNI-Eastbay working group. This group has been tasked with an ambitious and vital goal: to co-author a new “Hybrid Governance Framework” for emerging digital economies. This “Third Way” model will attempt to fuse KNI’s principles of algorithmic transparency and ethical accountability with the flexibility and speed required to foster financial inclusion in the UEMOA context.
This collaboration is a vital step for the Kingsman National Institute, ensuring our research in law and economics is tested against, and informed by, the complex, high-velocity realities of the 21st-century global economy. It marks the beginning of a crucial academic bridge between Athens and Abidjan.
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