The Team

Sharifah Sekalala – Principal Investigator

The project will be led by Dr Sharifah Sekalala, a Reader at the University of Warwick in the UK. Her research interests include global health law and inequality, with a focus on the power of law to constitute and reorder relationships at the national, transnational and global levels. This involves critically examining the ways in which global health law is made and who benefits from this process, examining the effect of global health law on vulnerable people, such as women, slum dwellers and sex workers, and analysing the effectiveness of attempts to use human rights law to provide remedies, as well as analysing the rise of global actors (institutions) in shaping global health law and the effects on Sub-Saharan African states in constructing national laws that comply with global health governance to curb infectious diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. She will coordinate the project and will also lead on identifying user groups for elite interviews and on in-country work in Uganda.

Pamela Andanda – Co-Investigator

Pamela Andanda is a Professor of Law at the University of Witwatersrand. Her research interests are in intellectual property, data protection, research integrity and ethics, biotechnology, health law and governance of research. Pamela is a member of the UNESCO’s International Bioethics Committee. Pamela is the chair of the Biospecimen and Data Governance Expert Committee, which was established by the African Academy of Sciences in March 2019, and she is also a member of the Data and Biospecimen Access Committee of the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa). She will lead on in-country work in South Africa, use her experience to lead on identifying elite interviewees on regulation and public policy dissemination.

Bitange Ndemo – Co-Investigator

Bitange Ndemo is Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Nairobi’s Business School. His research is focused on ICT within small and medium enterprises, and their influence on economic development. He was previously the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Communication and initiated several ambitious projects, such as Kenya Open Data, and the growth of tech hubs, such as iHub and mLab in Kenya. He will lead on in-country work in Kenya and use his ICT experience to identify elite interviewees in the app sector.

Ben Mkalama

Ben is a well-grounded professional with a unique blend of experience that ranges from academia, research and industry. He has over 29 years of working, academic and consultancy experience in senior leadership and management positions with academic, international financial and local organisations in Africa. He holds a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Nairobi where he also teaches entrepreneurship, innovations management and international business. He also holds a post-doctoral research fellowship at the same University. His current research interests are in entrepreneurship and digital innovation. He also has a keen interest on critical studies that focus on intersectional inequalities due to space, gender, financialization and environment. He is a post-doctoral research scholar on Work Package 2 of the project which focuses on creating new norms for digital health innovation.

Tatenda Chatikobo

Tatenda is a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Law School. His research areas include digital inequalities, digital coloniality, critical data studies, decolonial theories and cultural studies. On the project, Tatenda is employing the framework of digital coloniality as a conceptual tool to investigate mHealth data practises and explore some of the emerging resistances in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Belinda Rawson

Belinda is a qualified lawyer with an academic background in humanities and social justice and has worked at the University of Warwick’s School of Law since 2019 as an Associate Tutor and Research Assistant. During this time, she has been involved in numerous socio-legal projects related to decolonisation, human rights, migration, global health, and criminal law. In addition to leading on Work Package 5 on the project which explores the creation and vernacularisation of human rights-based health data governance norms, she is a PhD researcher tracing the humanitarian and punitive dimensions of asylum claims processes and judicial outcomes in the UK.

Yureshya Perera

Yureshya works as a Research Assistant for the project. She holds a Masters in Gender and International Development from the University of Warwick and possesses experience in the tech sector, particularly in the realms of data protection and digital identity. In addition to her tech-related expertise, she works as a development practitioner in South Asia, advocating for gender justice, racial justice, and reparative justice within the health and government sectors.

Ibrahim Nsereko

Ibrahim is a lawyer specialising in health and human rights practice and is the Head of Advocacy Capacity Enhancement at Afyana Haki Institute (Ahaki) and the Chairperson of the Health and Law Cluster of the Uganda Law Society. He has extensive experience in managing research and advocacy projects influencing legal and policy reform in the health sector. As part of the project’s broader aims, Ibrahim is empirically investigating how health apps are operating in practice in Uganda, how different stakeholders perceive the regulatory frameworks for collection of health data, and how regulatory frameworks to protect health app users can be improved.

Johannes Machinya

Johannes Machinya is a lecturer of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand. His research interests are in the interdisciplinary field of critical digital health sociology, situated at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and health sociology. He is particularly interested in digital health technologies, artificial intelligence, and algorithms and human rights; digital surveillance and processes of datafication; data privacy and security; and governance of emerging health-related technologies in Africa. In the project, Johannes' work focuses on Work Package 3 which explores the opportunities and challenges for the regulation of mHealth apps.

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Researchers affiliated with the project

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