The G5 Regulatory Collaboration Summit 2026, hosted by the Communications Regulators’ Association of Southern Africa (CRASA) and the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) at the Bingu International Convention Center in Lilongwe from 13 to 15 April, closed with the adoption of the  Lilongwe Declaration on Collaborative Regulation. Convened under the theme Rethinking Regulation in the Digital Age: Collaborative Regulation and Building Digital Ecosystems, the Declaration anchors itself to the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) G5 framework and sets out six shared principles and seven areas of collaborative action. It is, by its own terms, a voluntary, non-binding statement of shared intent.

That framing matters. The six principles: collaborative governance, enabling digital ecosystems, regional harmonisation, inclusive digital transformation, trust and resilience, and evidence-based regulation, are the right ones. But for African regulators working under real pressure from AI, platform consolidation, and rapidly shifting infrastructure economics, principles without mechanisms tend to age into wishful thinking. The question now is what makes Lilongwe’s Declaration land differently.

A Declaration in the right register

What the G5 Summit got right is that it began from regional reality rather than imported doctrine. Where global AI summits have moved from safety (Bletchley), to action (Paris), and sovereignty and cooperation (New Delhi), the Lilongwe agenda starts from a more practical premise: African regulatory authorities are confronting digital ecosystems whose centre of gravity sits outside their jurisdictions, and they are doing so with constrained capacity and evidence that is too often generic or arrives too late. Naming evidence-based regulation as a shared principle is an important signal. So is the treatment of emerging technology governance, such as AI, satellite, digital platforms and next-generation networks as a single integrated frontier rather than a series of siloed problems.

Where the Declaration leaves work to be done

Declarations move regulation only when they are codified into institutions, mechanisms, and resourcing. In the Lilongwe Decalaration, three gaps stand out:

First, evidence-based regulation appears as a principle rather than an architecture. Where will the evidence come from, who will produce it, who will translate it for time-pressed regulators, and on what timeline? Without answering these questions, the principle risks becoming the kind of language that sits in declarations without changing how decisions are made.

Second, the structural drivers of digital exclusion, affordability, market concentration, device costs, and wholesale access, are subsumed under “inclusive digital transformation” but are not named as the regulatory design problems they are. Research ICT Africa’s (RIA) After Access evidence shows repeatedly that connectivity indicators improve while meaningful use remains shallow and unequal. Inclusion is not a downstream consequence of more regulation; it is a question of whose constraints regulation is built around.

Third, the Declaration acknowledges research and academic institutions as partners in cooperation but does not yet commit to standing channels through which research enters regulatory decision-making. From within this work, we consistently see that the gap between research and regulation is not a knowledge gap. It is a usability gap.

What we take forward

Our contribution to the G5 Summit, drawn from RIA’s 25 years of demand-side and policy research, set out where we believe the next phase of work needs to sit. We will carry that agenda forward in five areas:

• We are advocating for embedded, recurring research–regulator channels, not occasional advisory roles. The clearest lesson from our engagement with the African Union Data Policy Framework, ICASA’s spectrum work, and South Africa’s Digital Markets Inquiry is that research influences regulation when it sits where decisions are being made.
• We will continue to institutionalise demand-side evidence as a regulatory input. The After Access programme is a living instrument: its value lies precisely in being longitudinal, comparable across countries, and built around how people actually access, afford, and use digital services.
• We will push for affordability and market structure to be treated as design problems, not symptoms. Retail price reductions matter, but the structural levers, wholesale access, interconnection transparency, licensing space for smaller and community operators, and dynamic and shared spectrum, are where contestable, inclusive markets are won.
• We will use  Just AI  as the framework that links emerging technology governance to justice, not only to safety or productivity. The Lilongwe Declaration’s reference to AI sits within a broader emerging-tech bracket; our position is that AI governance for Africa needs its own anticipatory evaluation methodology, and we will continue to develop it through the 2026 Africa Just AI Conference and our Framework of Inquiry.

We will continue working with our CRASA and Southern African Development Community (SADC) counterparts on the architecture for regional regulatory science, including shared datasets, joint working groups, regulatory sandboxes, and SADC-level guidelines for research evidence usability. The Lilongwe G5 Summit is the right convening to anchor this; the next one should report progress against it.

Towards collaborative, evidence-led regulation

What turns The Lilongwe Declaration’s principles into an impactful regulatory shift, rather than a regional pledge, is institutional follow-through. Regulation without evidence is guesswork, and research without uptake is wasted. At RIA, our commitment is to close that distance between principle and practice, between research and regulation, between stated intent and the lived realities the regulation is meant to reach.