Algorithmic Colonialism

The following is a transcript of Rumman Chowdhury’s talk on algorithmic colonialism, with the IntersectTO community on August 24 2019 in Toronto. You can find the accompanying reading list for her talk here, and slides here.

Thank you so much for making time on your Saturday to be here. I was posting on Twitter that it’s been a long time since I spoke in front of a lecture hall and I always feel at home here. I very much enjoy teaching and one of the things about moving over to industry is that I really miss having all the students and things like that, so I’m just indulging myself a little bit.  But my talk today is about algorithmic colonialism.

A little bit about myself: I’m a data scientist, a social scientist - a quantitative social scientist. My degrees are in quantitative methods in social science, as well as political science. As mentioned I lead Responsible AI at Accenture. I’m also a vocal and active advocate for the responsible use of technology in community-driven technological solutions. And importantly, I’m a child of immigrants.

So when I think about technology and the narratives around improving the lives or help improving the lives of people from the Global South, I can’t help but think of where I’m from. My family is from Bangladesh originally and we’re probably famously known for a Beatles concert, right? And that you probably have an image of starving children in huts, right? And these are the images are portrayed to you is actually full of, you know, poets, musicians, and some of them.. And you know actually, I found out recently one of the first speculative lit sci-fi feminists to exist was a Bangladeshi, Rukhaiya Hussein who wrote this book called “Imagining a World in which we had no men” and women were in-charge. And her work is sarcastic, cutting, and fabulous. And you know in a world in which she was a daughter of one of 4 wives of her father but was also raised to be literate and educated, you know it’s amazing to see her style of feminism coming out of a part of the world that is traditionally seen as uneducated or under-resourced so a lot of the work I’ll be talking about today is about how we can empower the best of people given what we already have and the skills they already bring to the table and not feel like the West needs to bring a White saviour complex and fixing or correcting peoples’ Indigenous cultures and societies that already exist.

So you’ve probably seen a lot of narratives about how technological investment in booming in the Global South and in particular, African countries are being held up as this example. So, Kenya is referred to as a Silicone Savannah. You’ve probably seen a lot of narratives around the start-up culture in different parts of Nigeria. There’s also a lot of tech investment in South Africa, etc.There are significant companies, a significant amount of investment going on by different companies. A few examples of the fine(?) infrastructure that’s being built. Rwanda’s Digital ID, which is more than just an identification card, it’s actually a register of birth, citizenship, marriage etc. It’s actually implemented by UK-based company, and you see a lot of investment from Western based companies. Most of the investment is coming from Chinese organizations and you know, China has a plan called the Belt and Road initiative to build 150 billion dollar global initiative by 2030.

So as an example the number one smartphone company in the entire continent is Transsion Holdings which is a Shenzhen based company. ZTE provides the infrastructure for the Ethiopian government and cloud walk is providing CCTV cameras, smart financial systems, airport railway and bus station security. So this is not just about a specific kind of technology—it's actually about laying down the infrastructure; the digital the digital civic infrastructure of all of these countries.

Just as an example, this is just Huawei. This is the dominance that one company has in the entire contents of these are all of the countries in which they're laying out surveillance project—but more interestingly and this is why it sort of has gone under notice for so long, they've laid out the 4G and 5G infrastructure—and not just cell phone infrastructure! Internet fiber optics have largely been laid out by different Chinese companies.

But you would say you know investment is good isn't it? I mean they're dumping in a lot of money of course is going to be a bit of quid pro quo but they're going to expand you know they're going to get money out of it —  but isn't there a benefit to people being connected to the digital world?  There absolutely is.I mean what would you have to have access to the Internet a functioning laptop etc… it makes ease of access to education a lot better, connectivity a lot better.

And people love to use the success story of the M-Pesa, which was a mobile-to-mobile digital currency that existed before we even had —we still don't really have—in the United States. I suppose people venmo each other, but that's a fairly new phenomenon, but we actually had mobile-to-mobile money transfer more readily available in Kenya before we even had it in most countries in the West.

And those have been very valuable in a place where having cash on you may be insecure, or banks are not as reliable — it is useful to have this technological infrastructure available to break down barriers. I don't want to underestimate the value of having technology. What I'm questioning here is—who's running it, and who's in the systems of power?

And to do that actually a look back in the political science literature the political economy literature about something called the Resource Curse or the “paradox of plenty”. What it means, in a nutshell, is that countries that had an abundance of natural resources—so fossil fuels and certain minerals, paradoxically - put them in scare quotes - tended to have lower economic growth-lower rates of democracy and worse developmental outcomes in countries with fewer natural resources.  This was a paper written by Jeffrey Sachs - Sachs and Warner in 1995 - where they coined this term the “Resource Curse”, the paradox of plenty.

So asking the same question: Why would resource rich be bad? If you're sitting on fields of oil—and the narratives people know the most are probably oil and diamonds—you have a massive amount of wealth you're sitting on; it's raw material wealth, so calling a country resource rich just as definition only—20 percent of the exports, or 20 percent of fiscal revenue comes from a non-renewable natural resource.

And actually about half of the countries that are defined as resource rich suffer from extreme dependence on this reserve as well for their fiscal revenues of their entire economy. It revolves around, whether it's oil diamonds etc. There's low savings rates among the people who live in the country, poor growth, lower levels of education, graduation of secondary schools, unemployment etc. and also importantly highly volatile resource revenue. So when your entire economy is reliant on one thing if there's any global fluctuation in the value of that good or products then you're taking a disproportionately hard hit or you know as if you've ever gotten any investment advice people always say diversify your portfolio. Essentially when you have a resource rich country, their portfolio is relying very much on one resource to keep it afloat.

 So what leads to this inconsistency? Why are some countries able to have a lot of natural resources — even be resource rich, be more protected? And why do others end up with these negative outcomes? So these four main questions to ask yourself: What is the system of government and governance? How trustworthy are the institutions? Who are the power players? And importantly I think this is where it will really resource curse literature will start to really tie into the algorithmic colonialism part—Is there a global systemic infrastructure that incentivizes corruption? So it's quite interesting and limited in a globalized world.

How we talk about countries as if they live in bubbles when there really isn't there really isn't a country in the world it doesn't rely on a global ecosystem, or somehow influenced by other countries either around other parts of the world. And this has always been the case is not just because of technology— but this basically always been the case.

One of the manifestations of the paradox of plenty or the resource curse is something known as Dutch disease. Just to give you a Western example. That phrase was coined in from an occurrence that happened in 1959 in the Netherlands where they discovered a massive pool of natural gas. And essentially it sounds great. They pour money and natural gas into the market. They're getting a lot of money. So this is how the consolidation of the economy starts to happen. The value of natural gas starts to inflate the currency. Selling anything but natural gas does not get you the kind of revenue because you can't sell it for the value that natural gas is selling it for. So you see other industries start to shudder. You see everything start to centralize on natural gas production, but then as other industries shutter U.S. unemployment, currency inflation leads to difficulty in buying goods if you live in a country. And what actually happened was that the government had to intervene, control the economy, and also artificially create jobs in the public sector so that they wouldn't have mass unemployment.

So this leads to a question of how the socio-economic system is structured—right, so they had this problem. How are they able to resolve it? They were able to resolve it with good governance and reliable institutions. So what we see in resource rich countries often is vertical integration versus a horizontal integration.

So when you have horizontal integration, you have interdependence. So you have an economy let's say for example an agricultural economy where maybe somebody is growing a product someone processes this product someone makes something out of the product and somebody else sells it. So someone's job is to grow wheat or corn, somebody somebody owns a mill in order to process that wheat, someone create bakes bread, and then someone else sells it in a market. Now the problem with simply a natural resource extraction — not only is it finite, so it's a zero sum game where everyone's fighting over this diminishing pool of resource saying if I don't get those diamonds somebody else will.

So that leads to actualization—but also there isn't this multiple step economy; the goal is to extract and then to sell in a global market. There's very rarely refinement or anything like that happening in these countries that usually happens in the places where they sell these products. So that that's more of what vertical integration looks like. 

So to explain the two: horizontal integration has more of a homegrown diverse economy. Wealth is earned in a decentralized manner, and it's not often controlled by either a private organization or the government—and importantly different parties have to get along to have a functioning economy. And that actually will supersede things like religious differences and nationalistic differences within the country.

Vertical integration on the other hand is a single or very few sources of industry—mostly raw materials export, which leads to a centralization of power. You have to have some sort of a flow or a bottleneck. And as a result you can only redistribute wealth if you have the government coming in and imposing taxation and redistribution. So you have to have a strong social state in order to actually redistribute wealth. And as I mentioned earlier, you have zero sum incentives. So we know there's a finite pool of natural resource; if I waste my time trying to make alliances someone else's taking the oil diamonds etc. ..so I need to move as quickly as possible and as aggressively as possible.

So as an example, bringing it back to the African continent is Gabon. In 1970 as oil was discovered and they followed the same characteristics of Dutch disease that I talked about earlier. Eighty percent of their revenue came from oil for a very long time and even up to more modern times. And in spite of mass investment education, there was a less than 50 percent secondary school graduation rate and 20 to 30 percent youth unemployment. And about 30 percent  of the people living below the poverty line. These are statistics about 2016.

And it was a country with a lot of patronage politics, so after liberation from the French they had about twenty four year ruler who was then superseded by his son. And the 2016 elections were a son were marred with a lot of controversy about corruption but is there a bottle to the resource curse. So the one thing. So what is the difference between the Netherlands and Gabon? Well colonialism.

So the foundations of this model—and this is a quote taken from the Al Jazeera opinion article that was part of the reading— the foundations of this model were laid during colonialism, when imperial powers, through conquest and coercion acquired sovereign from natives from levying taxes and importing customs duties to signing treaties and administering justice. So essentially, what colonizing powers did was eradicate the homegrown forms of governance, institutional power, and institutional legitimacy and replace it with their own. And when countries became decolonized—and the process of decolonization is also the process of recreating institutions that were eradicated—and frankly with the mass genocide of a lot of people, also forgotten.

So these communal ties or these institutions aren't just built out of nowhere they're built out of community ties. If you've eradicated these community ties then how can you start building institutions anew. Given that you're also starting from a place of disadvantage given that you've been economically stripped—as well so economically stripped, socially stripped, politically stripped—and then on top of that is this issue of suddenly you've now discovered a massive pool of wealth.

So the big difference between resource rich Western nations and resource rich non-Western nations often ends up being a history of colonialism—and we actually see an example. And this is where we start thinking about the global incentives for corruption. And you know my critique earlier of measuring things like corruption etc... as you know being country specific. SO there was a lot of measurements of the transparency international, different groups but you know it seems rather odd to say you know like Switzerland for example is ranks very high. France ranks fairly high as well. But an example here of where these countries will use their former colonies as essentially corruption arbitrage. So the elf system was actually a way for corrupt French business people to use Gabon as a hiding place for their slush funds and corrupt money.

So essentially that the responsibility of the corruption falls on the form formerly colonized country and the colonizer gets to walk away appearing as if they're a very stable and functioning society. You the tech parallel we see is something we call innovation arbitrage where often algorithms are tested, and the dirty data janitorial work is done in countries in which people have limited rights—and institutions are not as robust, because people don't have protections.

So what does this have to do with technology? So there is this phrase data is a new oil and you know if you're in tech and especially if you're in ethics in tech your kind of tired of hearing about it. But there is legitimacy to the phrase so this is a great quote by … economists who've been looking at this work and they say that modern organizations are driven by a data imperative that demands the extraction of all data from all these sources by any means possible. So data is essentially the lifeblood of technology. So whether you're talking about a really basic analytics system, or a really advanced artificial intelligence —they are not possible without data. And this interconnectivity so the difference here is—unlike oil diamonds etc...data isn’t mined or extracted—you actually have to build and control the infrastructure in order to mine that data. So the data doesn't organically exist. If you own the means of producing the data you own the means of collecting the data. And this is where we start talking about this infrastructure being laid by foreign entities and how this starts to resemble the colonialism that we saw earlier. The eradication of the institutions—or in this case not even allowing the ownership of the fundamental institutions—in order to give people ownership of data.

This was the article everybody latched on to and it's actually a really compelling case because it takes Kenya and the M-Pesa example and really starts to expand on it and starts to see over some years what's the impact it's had. And I've ended up really focusing on this example more than the other ones even if it's very unsexy. And what do I mean by unsexy? It's not this example and I have other ones later of like, facial recognition being used to spy on people, and private companies breaking into WhatsApp and Facebook accounts to incriminate opposition parties.

This sounded like such a great idea. So you know the infrastructure is laid out by a foreign entity. We have the M-Pesa come to exist which is a great thing. And then these companies move in and they say, hey, we're going to give you guys loans. So if you're at all familiar with the micro lending craze of the early 2000s that's actually when, I'm a political scientist, as I mentioned I was in Columbia at that time and it was the only thing anybody talked about like Grameen Bank and FINCA and giving these micro loans and they have been very valuable.

These small companies, based in Silicon Valley, decided to kind of recreate that from a mobile lending to lending perspective. And interestingly, one of the founders of branch was one of the founders of Kiva, If you're familiar with that organization it's a micro lending organization. And actually in full transparency I had interviewed for the head of data science role at Branch back in, I want to say 2016 or 2015. I can't even remember, this is before the whole AI ethics focus and I was horrified to find out exactly how they determined credit worthiness.

So essentially to give somebody a loan I had to determine credit worthiness. Now we have credit scores etc. and our country’s credit scores do not exist in some of these countries and that's usually the blocker with giving somebody a loan. So they figured out other ways to do it. So again, like people are given basically free cell phones, infrastructures made by foreign companies and then you download this app for Branch, and Tala does the same thing for the Branch system. What they do or what you actually give away are your rights to basically everything you own on your cell phone. They’re able to monitor your phone calls, text messages, they go into your social media they see who you're connected to, how often you post and again I interviewed years ago and when I found this out as a social scientist I can tell you those are really shoddy proxy variables for someone's credit worthiness especially if you're going into a country which has traditionally been low income.

 You can't use the same metrics of trying to determine whether someone's reliable you know using a metric like, “do you have a steady paycheck?” in a country in which people are often paid in cash. How would you even determine this. Right.

And by the way, it's the same narrative we see in the US for lower income individuals actually being perceived as less creditworthy because we are imposing rules that really only apply if you are of higher income right. So, multiple jobs for example, or having short term jobs, is seen as being less creditworthy than having a stable, reliable job for a long time.

But back to Brant and Tala. So what they did is institute these micro lending systems and what it has done is created a cycle of poverty and debt where people are constantly owing money to these organizations. There are some really powerful quotes in that piece but the one I latched on to the most was this one “Kenya's new experience of debt is worrying. It reveals a novel digitized form of slow violence that operates not so much through negotiated social relations, nor the threat of state enforcement as to the accumulation of data the commodification of reputation and the instrumentalization of sociality. “So again it's the eradication of existing kinship and community ties and the enforcement of vertical digitized foreign entities. So now we're no longer just impacting the economy and the political system we're literally not that this hasn't happened before, but reaching into kinship and community ties and eradicating those.

So previously people would for example, borrow money from their cousin and it would end up being enforced by their uncle to make sure it was paid back. And without those systems of accountability and also it's not just systems of accountability, there is this viciousness to this, you know, neutral enforcement, right? You have to pay back your loan by a certain time otherwise you get a penalty and there's no allowances made. So for example if you had used your kinship ties to borrow money and you say hey look I get an extra week, your family is going to give you an extra week and in good faith that you will pay it back. Also you do have the enforcement mechanism of your family structure to shame you into paying it back. But these apps they don't have that same sort of flexibility, care, and love that you're that your own family or kinship networks would give you.

So what that's created is actually this, as I mentioned, the cycle of debt and increasing cycle of poverty and all of the money that's raised from interest et cetera, is not staying in Kenya, it's going right back to Silicon Valley.

So case study 2 is Zimbabwean Cloud Walk I mentioned them earlier. So, Cloud walk is a Chinese company that's laying out the infrastructure. It’s actually the first advanced use of artificial intelligence that's been contracted in the entire continent. So I've mentioned earlier about the laying of the infrastructure. Now people are moving into utilizing that infrastructure with artificial intelligence.

So they have a contract with Zimbabwean government. And the fear is that they're going to actually use it to restrict citizens’ online expression and behaviors and if you know anything about the history of Zimbabwe and Mugabe This is not exactly a reliable institution or a system of government that people have a lot of faith in. But here's where the colonialism and the extraction comes in without consent. Part of the deal is to provide millions of black faces for the Chinese company to train its models.

So as these companies try to globalize and enter other markets the big critique is Chinese technology is built on Chinese faces. You need to diversify. They hear the critique from a purely economic perspective. What's the best way to diversify? Make partners where we can collect different faces and that's essentially what they have done.

The Uganda Zambia and Huawei example, it starts to get a little more insidious. So this picture is of Bobi Wine who is a viable opposition candidate. There's questions about him being Western backed et cetera. But essentially the harm done here is that while the engineers actually work with the Ugandan government to break into his WhatsApp group to figure out what he's doing et cetera.

So there's a video that's very compelling in the readings. There's also a really great article I posted so you could get past the paywall as well but essentially the other thing to notice here I actually forgot to mention the Zimbabwe example. Mugabe has actually said “I admire the way the Chinese government has control over social media and I want to mimic that in my government.” So what's also happening and this is where the colonialism starts to encroach on political and social norms and regulatory norms. There are laws that are coming on the books in these countries that allow for this sort of government overreaching enforcement.

What they did to Mr. Wine was legal under a 2010 law which gave the government the ability to quote, “secure its multidimensional interests,” which is the broadest statement anyone could ever really think of. So similarly in Zambia, Huawei technicians also infiltrated a Facebook group of opposition bloggers, leading to their arrest. And again similarly it was legal under the law.

So I do want to emphasize this is more than just facial recognition, is the surveillance ecosystem. So what is that? What is a surveillance ecosystem? So one, it's private or foreign actors controlling the civic digital backbone of a society and here's where my talk starts to move beyond these examples and to talk about Western examples as well.

This is not just to blame China. This is not just to say it's only happening in African countries it's actually in mass happening in India. It actually is happening in Ecuador as well. In this talk I wanted to focus very much on the African continent. But this is a phenomenon we're seeing over and over. And really what happens is these organizations, these companies they go in and say we're going to sell you the idea of a smart city and a safe city and in the U.S. it's framed as, we're going to find the next terrorist or we're going to find the next mass shooter.

 In other places it's framed as, we have a high level of crime we can find criminals. But every single time, it’s  framed as a national security issue. And they really play on people's fears. And again this is not just to blame Chinese companies, plenty of companies in the U.S. are doing the exact same thing. And the reason why the colonization link still holds is that what are the cities we do it first in? And they're the primarily minority cities: Detroit, New Orleans. These are the places in which facial recognition and the surveillance ecosystem is implemented first.

 So what is a surveillance ecosystem? What does the infrastructure of surveillance? Number one it's cloud based data systems that are owned by private organizations. So when something is owned by a private organization, as citizens we have less right to transparency, accountability over it. Facial recognition, which everyone is aware of. Online monitoring tools; so things like being able to hack into people's Facebook etc. groups but also things like digitizing the DMV so that your paper card that determines whether or not you’re legal, is digitally controlled and kept in some sort of a centralized digital database.

 There was talk, for example for a while of digitizing driver's licenses in the US. And my big fear of that is all somebody would have to do is erase you from existence.So we have to just push a button, hack into a cloud or even it could be an employee or state driven and they could literally erase you from existence. You have no physical paperwork to prove that you exist or you deserve to be there. Not that it stops ICE or CBP in the US either way. I don’t know if you've heard, this past week a Latino man with all of his paperwork on him was still detained and it was claimed that they're checking the paperwork of all Latino people, which is a massive overreach.

So it's not just facial recognition. But we have also things like financial software. So imagine we file our taxes online if you do the calculations et cetera all online and also government services. So again citizenship birth records, passports et cetera. And as I mentioned earlier, data just doesn't exist on the ground. It has to be digitized and created. So simply by creating a system of monitoring and measuring, you are now storing information.

And while we may all understand biometrics I'll give you a seemingly innocuous example in the city of San Francisco—police officers were using license plate scanners seemingly for a great and again it's always about security, protection etcetera. They were using license plate scanners instead of manually monitoring license plates to determine if somebody had overstayed how long they were supposed to park. So you know two hour parking zone, they could drive by, the camera picks up the license plate, they drive by two hours later and if the car is still there then it automatically sends a ticket. Sounds great. Sounds efficient but what what you end up having is a database of timestamps and license plates which then ICE requests from the city of San Francisco to track people that they think are either undesirables or illegal immigrants. So simply by having this public data even if it seems innocent it may be used in multiple ways and we don't actually have rights in the US over the data that is collected about us in public spaces. 

So what can we do? So talk a little bit about the resource curse literature and that's why I'd like to tie things to historical examples.

 So what have countries done to pull out of out of this situation? So one is good governance as I mentioned, reliable institutions. And so this doesn't just mean government is good. What this means is there have to be systems of accountability which is why the privatization of the civic digital infrastructure is really dangerous because with private companies, we don't have the same levels of redress with private companies that we do with government. So in the U.S. we can use something called the Freedom of Information Act we can fire a lot of these in a lot of these documents.

Private companies do not owe us any of this. If an algorithm is used and it is biased against us, we have really no way of figuring it out unless we actually have litigation about it. So good governance really just leads to better accountability.

Horizontal economies. So again not like instead of centralizing the reliance of region on a particular technology or a particular service or good how do we create horizontally decentralization of power and competition and diversification I think that's also the other thing. A lot of this technology lends itself towards a centralization of power.

Things are done more efficiently and the thing is in the tech world things are sold on efficiency right. There are two value propositions we make when we sell products technological products. Either one, it will make you more money or two, it will make your processes more efficient. Right. And efficiency seems to dominate everything but efficiency actually pushes you toward centralization. So how can we prevent the rise of surveillance state. So I was saying earlier this is not just in African countries this is replicated in India, Ecuador, and multiple cities in the US.

 In India it's particularly worrisome as a civic data digital infrastructure is actually being laid out by the government in participation with the Israeli Defense AI startups. So these companies are actually importing the kind of surveillance they use on Palestinians to India. And if you've been sort of following what's happening in Kashmir essentially by digitizing-- so there's sort of a re digitization of the caste system happening and it’s dangerous. So again it always seems like such a benefit to society to say we're going to create national biometrics.

As part of that, you have to prove your family lineage. So prove that you are truly of Indian descent that your parents were born there et cetera. So who does that exclude but the poorest communities like the Dalit classes but also people who may have been refugees and they also use it to highly scrutinize Muslims.

So what's going on in Kashmir right now is essentially the beginnings of quite similarly what the Chinese have done to the Uyghur population. It's the creation of a police state. Essentially the creation of a digitized police state and the dangerous part is it's not about cops on every corner. It's these invisible I.O.T that exists and the seemingly innocuous data that's picked up.

So we started with facial recognition bans in the U.S.— it's necessary but insufficient. So the surveillance ecosystem is not just facial recognition. And interestingly what we're seeing in Hong Kong with all the Hong Kong protests and all. They've started dismantling what was called Smart lampposts which are being sold in a lot of places which some of them don't even have facial recognition. Does things like monitor traffic, pick up air quality indicators. So they started dismantling smart lampposts.

And also we have to have safeguards as I mentioned for the civic digital infrastructure which can only come with good regulation, good institutions, and accountability by citizens and this is where the workshop we’re going to come into is really important because it's actually about creating community driven smart cities.

 What does it look like for the community to have control of these technologies and also tell you that loophole through which these technologies get implemented. It's because they're sold as a technology as a platform and they're sold as if your police department is buying, you know, Windows or they're buying like an S.U.P. system, if that means anything to you. It's sold as a technology implementation not something that infringes on civic rights or civil rights of individuals. So what we've we've actually seen as you know is the city of Seattle passed a surveillance ordinance in 2017.

What I really love about the ordinance we're getting into a ton of detail is they have explicit language around the protections of civil liberties, freedom of speech, racial equity or social justice which is quite important.

This is not without its flaws and what it doesn't cover is actually police body cameras or technology, I believe the language is something like the technology used for you know normal work like work day function. So technologies that are used by your employer. So it's not without limitations but is actually quite important because we are introducing this language of protecting civil rights, social justice, freedom of speech. These technologies are not actually considered as technologies that may do that again if we're talking about license plate scanners to determine if someone's parked too long. Theoretically that's no different from a police officer looking at it and writing you a ticket until it is.

So just a few conclusions to wrap up.  Number one, technological development of the global south is potentially beneficial, which should not be blindly adopted. So there's so much talk of algorithmic bias et cetera in the countries in which we've developed this technology. I can't imagine lifting and shifting it into a totally different social context but also that it shouldn't be blindly adopted because we can't give up ownership and rights of our civic infrastructure and our ownership of our own data to private organizations. But there is something to be learned from the resource curse literature so you can frame the challenges the potential outcomes and in doing that mapping you can figure out a smart way forward.

And the key to preventing a recolonization of the global south is citizen empowerment, good governance, and horizontal systems of power. Thank you.