KAMPALA – CONSENT, an organisation that does consumer advocacy has urged all the stakeholders including; NITA-Uganda, Uganda Communications Commission, Electricity Regulatory Authority, National Bureau of Standards, and the academia, among others to work hand in hand to safeguard the consumers in Uganda amid Artificial Intelligence penetration.
The call was made by Kimera Henry, CONSENT team leader during the Consumer Protection Agenda Breakfast Discourse on Thursday at Protea Hotel, Kololo, Kampala.
The engagement which included consumers, consumer advocates, MDAs, local government leaders, CSOs, academia, and service providers/private sector intended to catalyze networking, knowledge sharing, and accelerating transformation of consumer protection in Uganda, through better policies, practices, and investments to enable increased linkages and kick-start renewed cooperation amongst stakeholders to make lives easier, safer and better.
Kimera says that consumers live in a fast-moving and interconnected world that requires effective consumer protection mechanisms.
“New technologies are fast changing the way people live, do business, collaborate, and consume goods, services and information. The pace of technological advances is astonishing; globally, regulations are struggling to cope-up with the trends that cause the risks that necessitate call to action for consumer protection frameworks to mitigate the risks and maximize the potential of technologies to humanity.”
He noted that the growing demand for technologies is also proving that they are essential resources vital for life, increasing the need for quality of services/goods, protection, use and management as central to the global socioeconomic dynamics as consumers consistently rank quality of services, safety, and protection as the key element for successful value for their money.
“Technologies like Artificial Intelligence can ensure that goods and services given to consumers are better accessed through the provision of timely information and improved productivity enabling huge advances in consumer needs. Unfortunately, with all the benefits there are real risks of dis and misinformation about goods and services impeding positive consumer experiences crowned with misuse of consumer data leading to manipulation of consumers without their knowledge.”
According to him, in Uganda, consumer protection as a fundamental element for the sustainable development of healthy, safe and competitive markets is still a challenge in several goods and services sector systems.
Kimera told the press that since last week, they have been engaging different players including the kingdom of Buganda on the aspects of food safety, consumer protection, raising issues of food and nutrition, and food security.
“You cannot have nutrition without food safety. Eating unsafe food endangers you. We are saying if something is not safe, it is not good for the consumer. If food is not safe, it is not food.”
Through their campaign, CONSENT wants consumers to hold regulators accountable for unsafe products.
“Today Artificial Intelligence is running the economy in one way or another. It’s running our households. It’s running education. It has a role to play in agriculture, plays a role in health. It plays a role in food safety. It plays a role in the traffic lights today and security. So looking at all this, that the data collected by artificial intelligence, if not well used, it ends up affecting us.”
“So it is very key to have regulations and frameworks that you need to protect the consumer, protect the economy, protect the country. So these are issues that we have been deliberating on.”
Different players committed to working together to ensure that consumers are protected.
Joseph Kizito, head of the Consumer Affairs Department at the Uganda Communications Commission noted that AI is just a subsidiary for them in the concept of consumption.
He said that key among the functions of the commission is protecting the consumer in the consumption of these technologies.
He, however, decried illiteracy rates in Uganda which poses a big risk to the consumption of artificial intelligence.
“The risk of the common consumer issues we’re picking like misinformation, being frauded and then maybe applying the artificial intelligence for the wrong things or being manipulated and used by the bad guys who operate in the ICT area.”
Kizito said as a regulator, they are working toe and head to create awareness amongst consumers, especially in the rural areas on how to deal with fraud, issues of misinformation, impersonation, digital safety, digital financial safety, and many others that come with artificial intelligence.
He urged Ugandans to embrace AI and utilize it positively because is a good thing and it’s going to enhance doing things more efficiently.
