The Global Partnerships Conference 2026, co-hosted by the UK and South Africa in London this May, marks a deliberate shift in the logic of international development. The UK government has been clear. It intends to think like an investor rather than a donor, mobilising finance and technology to support country-led growth rather than delivering services from above. That ambition is worth taking seriously. However, for it to succeed, the conference needs to grapple honestly with a currently unanswered question – accountable to whom?
The language of digital governance in the Compact – intended as a non-binding statement of intent by conference attendees – is a step forward. Commitments to locally owned digital systems, equitable benefits, and safeguards against bias are all meaningful. The problem is not what is in the text. It is what is missing. The people these technologies are designed to serve are absent from the governance architecture. Sovereignty over systems is hollow if the citizens those systems are intended to protect cannot participate in designing them or hold them to account when they fail.
Citizens face accountability displacement
Evidence from South Africa, one of the conference’s co-hosts and a country with one of the continent’s most developed government-driven social protection systems, makes this case sharply. The DISPACT research project, conducted across the Eastern Cape and Western Cape provinces, generated evidence from grant beneficiaries, civil society organisations, and government stakeholders. What emerged was not a straightforward story of exclusion from digital access. The more troubling finding is what happens to people once they are inside these systems.
We describe this as accountability displacement, the process by which digitalisation inverts the accountability relationship, making citizens accountable to opaque, automated systems rather than the state being accountable to citizens. A clear illustration comes from social grant beneficiaries, who receive SMS messages on the very day of or day before their payment is due, informing them they are unverified recipients who must travel to South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) offices. On arrival, a verification process can conclude they owe the state money back, based on a means-test calculation applied retrospectively.
A recent factsheet from the Institute for Economic Justice documents how this policy, designed to crackdown on fraud, disproportionately targets grant recipients, including elderly women, rather than targeting the structural conditions that generate irregular payments in the first place. Fraud prevention has taken precedence over the constitutional right to social protection. The system is neither fully automated nor fully human. Applications are processed digitally, means-testing runs automatically against multiple government databases, and decisions arrive by SMS. However, when something fails, citizens are directed to physical offices where staff are themselves constrained by automated outputs they cannot easily interrogate or override. The accountability gap lives precisely in this hybrid space.
Download the report on South Africa’s Digitalised Social Protection System
Embed accountability from the outset to achieve better results
A rapid review for the Africa Technology and Innovation Partnerships (ATIP) programme funded by UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), reaches a complementary finding from a different angle. Africa’s most successful home-grown innovations, from mobile money to agricultural technology platforms, emerged from locally relevant problem-solving rather than from externally designed technology being brought in. However, across the continent, a persistent failure in digital governance remains. Accountability is treated as compliance management rather than as a design principle embedded from the outset.
This is where the investor framing becomes important to get right. Investors are accountable to their partners and their returns. Development investment that bypasses accountability to beneficiaries does not simply fail ethically, it tends to fail practically too. Systems that exclude meaningful citizen participation generate higher rates of erroneous exclusion, greater civil society friction, increased legal challenge, and ultimately weaker uptake and sustainability. The ATIP review is explicit on this point. Technology ventures deploying AI platforms, digital financial services, or market-facing innovations only achieve equitable and sustainable outcomes when accountability to end users is embedded in the business model and governance architecture from the start.
The constructive case for citizens being able to hold technology ventures to account is therefore also a commercial one. Investing in accessible feedback and appeals mechanisms, in co-design processes that include the populations most affected, and in civil society organisations empowered to act as intermediaries between citizens and digital systems, reduces the costs of system failure downstream. It strengthens the quality and legitimacy of data on which future investment decisions depend. It builds the institutional trust that makes populations willing to engage with digital public services over time, which is precisely the foundation on which inclusive digital economies are built.
Treat accountability as a performance indicator
For the Global Partnerships Conference to deliver on its ambition of leaving no one behind, the Compact, and its signatories, need to go further. There needs to be a rights-bearing subject, the person the investment is intended to serve. Countries, technology companies, private investors and charitable donors need to commit to meaningful participation in the design of technology, not only governance of its outputs. Furthermore, it needs to treat accountability to affected individuals and organisations as a performance indicator for investment, not an afterthought.
South Africa’s position as co-host for the Conference is an opportunity, not only a diplomatic formality. The evidence from its own social welfare system shows both the scale of the accountability deficit in digitalised public services and the cost of leaving it unaddressed. South Africa brings to this conference not only political partnership but empirical evidence of what happens when digital innovation outpaces accountability to the people it is meant to serve. That evidence should shape the investment commitments made in May, not only the aspiration to leave no one behind.
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