8 from the people-centred formulation of rights-preserving policies and regulations to ensuring access to and use of data to enable more equitable inclusion in the data economy. Although the harms associated with the concentration of data and information and asymmetries of power are universal, the impacts are uneven, both between and within countries. Creating policies that mitigate the differential risk for different categories of people, such as children, or categories of data in different sectors, such as health data, or ensuring that the increasing centrality of data does not perpetuate historical injustices and structural inequalities will require far more granular and adaptive regulation. While a right preserving data policy framework will be essential, the individualised notions of privacy, freedom of expression and access to information (first generation rights) in current data protection normative frameworks will not be sufficient to ensure more equitable and just outcomes. Second-generation social and economic rights are also relevant to several areas of data governance in relation to data availability, accessibility, usability, and integrity that require data governance to impact equitable inclusion. This highlights the need to move beyond only negative compliance regulation to positive enabling regulation that will create an environment for African states and citizens to participate effectively in the digital economy. Creating the conditions that allow for the necessary access to data while safeguarding rights will require building institutional capacity within the state and the capabilities to regulate agilely to harness the potential of data to address some of the continent’s most intractable problems. To do so, policymakers need to balance some of the tensions in the valuing of data in order to optimise it for these purposes. The transformation of data into useful information to guide decision-making revolves around the data value chain where firms and certain public entities are adequately equipped with enabling frameworks to support a coherent data ecosystem. Generating value from data can enhance private interests, such as improving firm operational efficiency, increasing their customer base, and creating innovative products and services that benefit commercial activities and data subjects. For governments, public value from data is realised by ensuring that the socioeconomic benefits of data accrue to enable the achievement of wider socio-economic goals. While public and private data valuation have different intentions and outcomes, they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, market and non-market value should not be correlated with the private sector and public sector. Non-market value could be linked to research or civil society too. The public sector can also create market value by opening certain data sets and establishing new revenue streams. There are also innovative interplays between public and private actors that can improve the overall data ecosystem to meet socio-economic development needs and enhanced welfare. With the increasing complexity and adaptiveness of the global communications system, both newer and more traditional forms of governance are arguably proving incapable of providing adequate tools for the governance of global public goods such as data. From a policy point of view, there is a growing distinction being drawn between data value-creation and the valueextracting features of existing data-intensive and platform-oriented industry behaviour and business models (Mazzucato et al., 2020).There has been little restraint either from competition or data regulators on the rise of monopolistic global platforms producing and extracting massive amounts of private data, which has been commodified with seemingly little regard for the social and negative implications for the data subjects (Zuboff, 2018). This may require specific and transversal regulatory responses in order to preserve the positive obligations of data governance.