Uganda: Noeline Nassuuna, Defenders Protection Initiative - Inclusion Means Nothing If It Isn't Safe

Uganda has spent years chasing digital inclusion, more people online, more mobile money accounts, more government services moved onto a phone screen. Noeline Nassuuna of the Defenders Protection Initiative thinks we have been counting the wrong thing.

Speaking at the State of the Digital Economy event held on July 24th 2026 at the Next Media park, Nassuuna said it without much room for interpretation. "We cannot speak of digital inclusion if digital platforms are not safe and secure." It sounds almost obvious once said out loud, and that is exactly the problem. Inclusion gets measured in numbers, how many new users, how many new sign ups, how many people onboarded this quarter, and almost never in whether those same people are actually safe once they are in.

That gap matters most for the people digital inclusion is supposed to help in the first place. It is usually the newest, least experienced users, someone just getting their first smartphone, a first time mobile money account, who are also the least equipped to spot a scam or recognise when a platform has failed to protect their data. Bringing someone onto a digital service without protecting them once they're there isn't really inclusion, it's exposure dressed up as progress.

That is the real weight behind Nassuuna's point. Uganda can keep pushing digital identity systems, mobile money and online public services further into daily life, but every one of those systems built without protection baked in from the start becomes a liability for exactly the people it was meant to serve. Retrofitting safety after harm has already happened, after someone's data has leaked or their account has been drained, isn't protection, it's damage control, and it comes far too late for the person it happened to.

So maybe the real measure of digital inclusion was never how many people we've brought online. It's whether the platforms we're bringing them onto are actually safe enough to deserve their trust, and right now, going by what Nassuuna is seeing, too many of them aren't.

Read the original article on Nile Post.