Why this exists
If you're expanding a product into Ghana, you shouldn't have to start by reading a 120-page law. You need a clear summary of the rules, the key obligations, links to the official sources, and a way to compare them with the countries where you already operate.
Governance Atlas exists to make that information easier to find and understand, especially across Africa, where data protection laws have developed rapidly but are often harder to navigate than better-known regimes such as the GDPR.
It is for the startup founder exploring a new market, the data professional trying to understand their organisation's responsibilities, the privacy or data protection professional working across multiple jurisdictions, and anyone who wants to understand how different countries regulate personal data.
What this covers
Governance Atlas covers personal data protection: the rules that determine how organisations may collect, use, share, store and delete information about identifiable people. That includes the obligations placed on organisations, the rights given to individuals, the regulators who enforce them, and the penalties for getting it wrong.
Not everything in this field is a statute. Alongside Acts of parliament you will find regulations, decrees, proclamations, directives and binding regional instruments, which is why the atlas refers to them collectively as regulations rather than laws.
Two things sit outside the current scope. Data security — encryption standards, incident response, cybercrime statutes — is touched on only where a personal data regulation requires it. And data governance in the broader sense, meaning how an organisation manages ownership, quality, lineage and definitions across all its data, is a wider discipline than this atlas covers. The Resources page lists tools that support that work, but the country briefs are specifically about personal data.
What this is not
Governance Atlas is not legal advice. The information here is intended to help you understand and explore personal data protection regulations, not to make legal or compliance decisions.
Laws change, interpretations differ, and the rules that apply depend on your organisation and its activities. Always check the official sources linked on each country page, and seek qualified legal advice when you need to make a decision that depends on the law.
Who builds it
Governance Atlas is built by Ayoade Adegbite, a data engineer working across data engineering, analytics engineering, and data governance.
Ayoade builds open-source tools around data, metadata, governance, and developer workflows. Governance Atlas is part of that broader work: making the systems and information around data easier to understand, use, and govern.
The goal is simple: help people build better data systems with governance considered from the start, rather than treated as an afterthought.