Digital Sovereignty: Building Strategic Autonomy for Countries of the Global South
Information technology is playing an increasingly important role not only in the economy but also in politics. Those who control digital tools globally can set the rules of the game. That makes control over critical information infrastructure a strategic issue.
The issue was discussed on October 10 in Moscow at the Second Global Digital Forum during a presentation titled “Digital Sovereignty in a Multipolar World: Tools for Assessing and Harmonizing Approaches to IT Cooperation.”
The experts taking part in the discussion included representatives of BRICS countries and what is commonly called the Global South. But the session’s moderator, Cristina Amor Maclang, co-founder of the International Digital Economies Association (iDEA) and GeiserMaclang in the Philippines, immediately called for abandoning the latter term:
“Stop using the term ‘Global South.’ It is an attempt to marginalize us, even though we represent 82% of the world’s population. Our goal is not simply data storage, but strategic digital autonomy,” she said.
Russia, where digital sovereignty has been a government priority for several years, shares its international partners’ drive for independence. It is also developing its own tools to objectively assess national capabilities, including under crisis conditions.
One such tool is the Digital Sovereignty Index, which Yuri Lindre, Deputy Director General at the Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC), presented to forum attendees. He noted that traditional rankings measure success through indicators such as investment and patents but overlook resilience to shocks.
“Digital sovereignty is a state’s ability to maintain its development trajectory even under external pressure,” Lindre explained. According to his data, Russia ranks third globally on this measure, after China and the United States. He said this reflects the country’s ability to keep critical systems running under sanctions.
Participants agreed that each country follows its own digital development path, which cannot be measured by investment alone, and shared their countries’ experiences.
Patrick Saidu Conteh, CEO of Africa Fintech Network in Sierra Leone, highlighted the unique challenges facing Africa, where legislation is fragmented across 54 countries. “We don’t have a unified digital system. We are developing a system for verifying credentials so that our licenses are recognized by neighboring countries,” he said.
Flip de Bruyn, founder of Future CC in Namibia, acknowledged that his country cannot yet claim digital sovereignty. “If the App Store or SWIFT were shut off tomorrow, would we have a Plan B? We don’t manufacture hardware or software; we are completely dependent. The key question is whether we have alternatives to these technologies and the people who run them.”
Representatives of Asian countries are already developing their own digital tools. Jatinder Handoo, CEO of Unified Fintech Forum in India, spoke about the success of Aadhaar, a biometric identification system, and UPI, a payment interface that processes 20 billion transactions a month. “This has accelerated financial inclusion, and we are ready to share our experience,” he said.
Yet the path to sovereignty is difficult even for these countries. Aung Zayar Lwin, president of the Myanmar Digital Economy Association (MDEA), who had experienced the revocation of Microsoft licenses, emphasized the importance of skilled people: “Infrastructure alone is not enough. You need people to maintain it. We need skilled professionals and open-source code.”
Other aspects of digital sovereignty also came up. Ferlly Ganinduto, secretary-general of AFTECH in Indonesia, warned against going too far toward isolationism. “Excessive localization makes services more expensive. Digital autonomy does not mean banning everything foreign; it means knowing how to manage dependencies,” he said, citing ASEAN’s successful cross-border QR payment system as an example.
The discussion ended with a shared conclusion: in the 21st century, digital sovereignty does not mean isolation. It means keeping systems operational during a crisis by relying on domestic talent, open standards and partnerships. The global majority no longer wants to remain a passive consumer. The future lies in a multipolar digital landscape in which every country has the right to its own code and its own development path.
