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After destroying the U.S. foreign aid system, the Trump administration is now demanding multiple African nations hand over their citizen's sensitive health care data in exchange for life-saving healthcare funding. This is the data colonialism nightmare a lot of us were worried about 10 years ago.

The African nations that hand over their data for the Trump admin to do God knows what with will, of course, NOT be prioritized for access to medical products that are PRODUCED with their data:

The term "data colonialism" was popularized in 2018 by academics Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, to describe how more powerful actors now consistently exploit human beings data for their own capitalist benefit: unfortunately, it's a framework that keeps getting more relevant:

I've done some of my own writing on how data/digital colonialism has been too often tethered to efforts to provide aid, like this piece from 2019 about Facebook's efforts to map the planet digitally...to get more people online, but also to create more Facebook users:

In early 2020, I wrote about how concerned I was that the Trump admin was considering partnering with Google to force Americans to give them their data in exchange for a Covid test. Horrifyingly, the second Trump admin is now rolling this kind of grotesque public-private coercion out globally.

And yes, as this excellent ProPublica story repeatedly emphasizes: a core reason that the Trump admin is able to make these coercive, repugnant demands that African nations exchange data for lives is because they destroyed the old USAID system that *didn't* work this way: