9 3.2 NEED FOR DATA GOVERNANCE - CREATING VALUE, PREVENTING HARMS Data governance at a macro level emerges as an opportunity to use standards, rules, norms and principles as mechanisms for both mitigating against identified data risks and harms while advancing data economy development and digital dividends. Policy on data governance, therefore, has some practical mechanisms: • aligning the principles to underscore data governance as a normative function; • assigning roles and responsibilities for the implementation of policy at a macro and micro level; • identifying and ensuring legal and policy clarity for mechanisms for implementing data governance; • identifying and encouraging collaboration across vertical and horizontal stakeholder groups; • balancing the need for circulation of data to enhance value creation while creating economic incentives for investments in data infrastructure and services and so on; and • establishing trust mechanisms to support data sharing under terms and conditions agreed upon by all parties on rules for data use and issues of liability (data accuracy, for instance). This simplification of data governance policy must then be contextualised within the challenges and opportunities described below. In so doing, governance priorities become: Data definition - Providing specificity and detail on the types of data to be regulated and to what extent to ensure the maximisation of benefit for different role players in the implementation of data policy. This should be done cognisant of the value and nature and data. Continental coordination - Providing mechanisms and priorities for coordination within the continent to strengthen Africa’s position within global governance and provide support for domestication. Domestic institutional capacity - Assigning obligations, responsibilities and powers for institutional actors at the national level that can help create a consistent domestic environment for data communities (public and private) to institute data activities. Domestic collaboration - Ensuring policy alignment, identifying multi-stakeholder participants and advancing mechanisms for successful domestication. Policy support - Providing implementable standards and solutions that focus on the achievement of healthy domestic data quality, control, access and interoperability, processing and protection, and security as the means for growing a data economy. Clarity - Ensuring clarity, which facilitates compliance, does not have unintended restriction but can also serve as a foundation for cross-border (and cross-silo) coordination.