Published 4 hours ago
Letlhokwa Mpedi
The writer serves as Vice-Chancellor and Principal at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.
The global conversation about technology in healthcare often looks to Silicon Valley for inspiration. It should be looking to Africa instead.
Nearly half a century ago, global leaders adopted the historic Declaration of Alma-Ata. That declaration articulated a bold and moral vision: health as a fundamental human right, and primary healthcare as the key to achieving ‘Health for All’. Four decades later, the international community reaffirmed that commitment through the Declaration of Astana, recognizing that strong primary healthcare systems are essential to achieving universal health coverage and the Sustainable Development Goals. Today, as we navigate rapid technological transformation, we must ask how digital innovation can serve, rather than distort, this foundational vision of primary healthcare.
We often talk about our digital heritage as a means of preservation. But what of our digital remains? Scrolling through my Facebook feed, I am often confronted with the horror of birthday reminders of those no longer with us. The platform is not designed to know this and therein lies the problem.
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Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute have projected that somewhere between 1.4 and 4.9 billion Facebook profiles will belong to deceased users by the end of this century. This raises the frightening concern that the dead will eventually outnumber the living on the platform- a concern not only confined to Facebook. Our digital lives are built for the living, with almost no thought given to what happens when we are not.
When a person signs up for a digital service, they accept a licence to use the service, governed by terms they almost certainly did not read, which invariably contain a clause terminating that licence upon death. This creates an immediate conflict with inheritance law. An executor administering an estate has a duty to identify and protect the deceased’s assets. But many digital assets are not legal assets at all.
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Different jurisdictions have approached this problem with varying degrees of urgency. In the United States, some states have adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which gives executors and trustees a limited legal pathway to access a deceased person’s digital accounts. However, the critical limitation is that platform terms of service retain supremacy. Unless the account holder explicitly used the platform’s own legacy tools, to grant posthumous access, an executor’s legal authority may amount to very little in practice.
Germany’s Federal Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that digital accounts are inheritable in the same manner as physical correspondence. This was a landmark decision that placed heirs firmly in the picture. France has taken a more cautious approach, which emphasizes the post-mortem privacy interests of the deceased.
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In December 2025, English and Welsh legislation formally recognized digital assets as property for the first time. Öhman and Watson’s research encourages scholars of online death to broaden their geographical scope, focusing particularly on South Asia and Africa, where their models suggest that deceased digital profiles will be most prevalent in the coming decades. Yet, these are precisely the regions where legal frameworks are least equipped to respond.
Most frameworks relating to estate administration on the continent were established in the pre-digital age. Across the continent, where mobile money, cryptocurrency adoption, and social media use have all grown at an extraordinary speed, the gap between what people own digitally and what the law recognizes widens every year. While Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana have begun moving toward formal digital asset regulation, these efforts have focused almost exclusively on financial assets and living users. In South Africa, succession law balances the Intestate Succession Act against customary law traditions that continue to shape how families understand inheritance. Courts and practitioners, however, are ill-prepared to handle digital remains.
Dr Edina Harbinja, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Birmingham and leading expert in digital succession, argues that posthumous privacy should “transcend death, allowing individuals to control their privacy, identity and personal data post-mortem”. Her research shows that people do want this control. The trouble is that wanting it and having the legal means to exercise it are entirely different things. This is a gap that legal scholars have named the “posthumous privacy paradox”.
Some solutions for Africa are beginning to emerge. For example, expanding data protection frameworks to extend privacy protections beyond death would clarify individuals’ rights over their digital remains. Fiduciary access laws could enable executors to manage digital accounts while preserving the privacy settings the deceased chose in life. A stewardship model or digital will could designate digital assets according to documented wishes. Post-mortem personality rights could guard against the unauthorized use of a deceased person’s identity. At the platform level, legacy tools could be mandated rather than left as optional features.
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However, the deeper problem is structural. We have grown accustomed to thinking of our digital lives as extensions of ourselves, but we’ve been slower to reckon with the possibility that they may well outlive us.
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Related Topics:#Africa, #Featured, #News Letter, #newsletter, #Nigeria, #South Africa.
