Linda Bonyo is a digital law expert working on digital policy and justice innovation within the African continent. She consults on data governance and artificial intelligence, digital identity and digital trade policy. She is the CEO & Founder of the Lawyers Hub. The Lawyers Hub is a Pan-African law-tech organization that works on digital policy and justice innovation. Headquartered in Kenya and serving the Global South, Lawyers Hub leverages on the need for sustainable and inclusive tech policy across the African continent. Since its inception, the hub has achieved great progress and now runs the Africa Digital Policy Institute, Africa Law Tech Association, The Africa Start-up Law Accelerator, and convenes the annual Africa Law Tech Festival and the Africa Legal Innovation week on justice innovation. The organisation is the publisher of the Africa Journal on Law & Tech. The Lawyers Hub’s work is focused on privacy and data protection, artificial intelligence, intellectual property, digital identity, internet governance, digital tax and lending, tech and democracy. Since 2020, the Lawyers Hub has convened the Africa Law Festival that brought together policymakers, academia and legal-tech organizations from 36+ countries within the African continent, curated rapid tech solutions under the Global Legal Hackathon, and developed key policy briefs for the African continent on artificial intelligence, data privacy & digital identity, tech and migration, and taxing the digital economy. Linda has steered the Lawyers Hub to a regional tech policy hub in record time, with the Festival convening in Europe in 2022 (Paris, Brussels and Berlin).
Linda has consulted for different international organizations, including the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) as a digital expert on data governance and digital identity; by supporting the drafting of the Africa Union’s Data Policy Framework in 2021; and in providing support to the Africa Union Commission Committee on Artificial Intelligence. She has consulted for GIZ, Data for SDGs and the UN Foundation on the artificial intelligence legal landscape in Kenya. She has also supported the digital identity work in Kenya, Botswana, Nigeria (Kaduna State), Somalia and Ethiopia.
Linda has worked on analyzing the Digital Trade landscape and legal drafting of the Additional Protocol on Digital Trade to the Africa Free Trade Agreement. In support of the harmonization of laws towards a single digit market in Africa, she worked to assess the state of the single digit market in support of the AU strategy for the single digit market. She has also consulted on the harmonization of e-commerce policies in Central Africa towards a single digit market for the francophone Economic Community of Central African States. Linda has worked on inclusive startup policies for digitally enabled businesses in Africa. She has also consulted on startup law development in Kenya and Senegal with partners such as Mozilla and Omidyar Network. She developed a draft innovation policy framework for commercialization of intellectual property for the Kenya National Innovation Agency and an alternative Digital Identity Bill through a countrywide consultative process and through innovative policy hackathons. Linda has worked on central bank digital currencies and developed a paper for AFRODAD on possibilities to alleviating Africa’s debt through digital currencies.
Linda is a Tech Women Fellow 2020, a member of the Real Facebook Oversite Board, and was globally recognized in 2020 as a Good ID Community Champion on Privacy. Linda is a respected tech lawyer and a licensed attorney of the High Court of Kenya. She has taught on AI and the law globally, at Sciences Po University in France and Goethe Institute’s AI Summer School in Germany.
Linda is a passionate policy innovator and sits at the cusp of technology, society and law. As a thought leader in tech regulation, she has appeared on various international and local media including the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24 and has aptly spoken at international fora, notably the Internet Governance Forum, Council of Europe, and to select members of the German parliament on tech, regulation and entrepreneurship.