This dialogue brings together two speakers, Senior Programme Officer, Paul Kimumwe (Collaboration for International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa or CIPESA, Uganda) and a public health doctor, Dr Sylvia Karpagam (based in Karnataka, India) in conversation with each other about the place of digital rights in the post-2000 landscape of health, nutrition, and disability in (Eastern and Southern) Africa and South Asia. The conversation will foreground debates on food, health security and protections for disabled groups, and against malnutrition in a data-fuelled governmental and neoliberal landscape. The dialogue will feature these speakers exploring the intersecting roles of philanthropic bodies and private sector entities in the public domain, both of which are manifest in health apps.  It will feature these speakers reflecting on the recent history of ‘informed consent’, ‘personal data protection’ and ‘centralised digitisation’ and the implementation of related legislations both at the height of the pandemic and the legacy of contact-tracing, online vaccine registration, and medical surveillance since then. Paul is currently pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University, US.

Paul Kimumwe is a Senior Programme Officer – Research and Advocacy, at the Collaboration for International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA). He has over 18 years experience in media and communication, with particular interest in media policy and legislation; freedom of expression; and digital rights. He has previously worked with Panos Eastern Africa as a Regional Program Coordinator, ARTICLE 19 Eastern Africa as a Senior Program Officer for Freedom of Expression; African Center for Media Excellence as Program Officer - Grants and Fellowships and PATH-Uganda as Communication and Advocacy Officer. He is the author of Media Regulation and Practice in Uganda: A Journalists Handbook 2019, and Djibouti: Media and the Law 2014; and co-author of State of Media Freedom and Safety of Journalists in Africa Report 2022. He holds a master’s degree in Communication Studies from the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and a Bachelor’s in Mass Communication from Makerere University, Uganda. Paul is currently pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University, US

Dr Sylvia Karpagam is a public health doctor and researcher working on the social determinants of health. She has been part of fact findings on issues related to human and health rights violations and conducts trainings and workshops etc. She is a Working editor for the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME), and on the expert committee of ALEPH2020 which is an interdisciplinary and international initiative on sustainable and evidence based nutrition. She was a Member, Advisory Monitoring Team (AMT), for the Pan Asian Collaboration for Evidence based e-health adoption and action (PANACeA), supported by International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada for “Community based e-health promotion for safe motherhood” for Pakistan, Indonesia and Philippines and “Improving maternal health services by using ICT for remote consultation” in Mongolia and Philippines. She was the  health coordinator for the National Family Health Survey (fourth round) and Medical Officer of Anti-Retroviral Therapy at Bowring Hospital in Bengaluru. She has published on the social determinants of anemia, the adverse impact of the cattle slaughter ban in Karnataka, the role of the healthcare system in custodial torture, occupational hazards of invisibilised frontline workers (engaged in cleaning hospitals, in mortuaries, burial grounds, waste disposal) during Covid-19, caste discrimination in the state mid-day meal schemes, public health ethics, occupational hazards in healthcare, tele-medicine, the ramifications of the National Digital Health Mission (Ayushman Bharat in particular) for consent and personal data for publications such as OUP, Sage, The Wire, News Minute, Newslaundry, Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, Social Change, and Samyukta Journal of Gender Studies. 

Curators: Tarangini Sriraman (King's and Labor Tech Research Network) and Aakash Solanki (University of Toronto and Labor Tech) hosted by King's College London Department of History in collaboration with Labor Tech Research Network, King’s India Institute, Africa Leadership Centre, Brazil Institute, and Menzies Australia Institute (Global Institutes)