Tech · Equality · Regulatory Risk Assessment
by the House of Fiscal Wisdom
A multi-strand research and governance initiative interrogating the political economy of digital infrastructure, its gendered dimensions, its fiscal consequences, and the regulatory architectures required to govern it justly.
Project TERRA proceeds from a foundational premise: the infrastructures, algorithms, and fiscal architectures underpinning the digital economy were designed within, and continue to reproduce, asymmetries of power that disproportionately disadvantage women, capital-importing developing countries, and communities at the margins of formal economic life.
These are not discrete problems amenable to isolated technical fixes. Algorithmic systems encoding gender bias are embedded in the very platforms whose infrastructure raises contested questions of taxation and fiscal jurisdiction. The data centres housing that infrastructure operate within regulatory environments that are themselves products of colonial administrative inheritances, legal frameworks designed for analogue economies and export oriented resource extraction rather than for the governance of digital capital flows.
A regulatory sandbox, properly designed, offers a controlled space for states to test adaptive governance responses. Poorly designed, it risks legitimising regulatory inaction or providing cover for the entrenchment of existing asymmetries. Project TERRA works at the intersection of these concerns, producing policy-relevant research, technical governance frameworks, and practitioner tools.
A short introduction to the questions Project TERRA takes up, setting out how the fiscal and regulatory architecture of the digital economy bears on women's work, and why the analysis begins from a decolonial feminist political economy position rather than from a purely technical account of platform design.
Project TERRA (Technology, Equality and Regulatory Risk Assessment), House of Fiscal Wisdom.
youtube.com/watch?v=it8rOKSYKnc →Examining how algorithmic systems encode and reproduce gender-based exclusions in labour markets, financial services, and social protection, with particular attention to the invisibility of care labour and informal work within automated decision making architectures.
Analysing the tax treatment of data centres in Kenya and across the African continent, interrogating transfer pricing risks, incentive architecture, withholding tax policy, and the domestic resource mobilisation consequences of inadequate fiscal frameworks for digital infrastructure.
Developing a fit for purpose regulatory sandbox for data centre governance in Kenya, in partnership with the Kenya Revenue Authority, the Communications Authority of Kenya, and the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy, assessing the conditions under which sandboxes can test adaptive governance rather than defer accountability or enable regulatory capture.
Project TERRA's methodology is not value-neutral. It is grounded in an analytical tradition that takes structural power seriously, one that asks not only what the rules are, but who made them, in whose interests, and at whose expense.
"Fiscal systems are not technical instruments. They are political settlements, and their consequences for equality are inseparable from their design."
Situating digital infrastructure governance within the colonial inheritance of African fiscal and regulatory systems, identifying the structural conditions that constrain or enable effective domestic governance of technology firms.
Examining existing legal frameworks, including Kenya's Income Tax Act, Data Protection Act, and emerging digital economy legislation, through a critical lens attentive to legislative gaps, interpretive ambiguity, and enforcement constraints.
Working directly with the Kenya Revenue Authority, the Communications Authority of Kenya, the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy, civil society organisations, and affected communities to develop governance tools grounded in institutional realities rather than abstract policy prescription.
Converting research findings into legislative submissions, technical guidance documents, and training materials designed for use by African tax authorities, regulators, and parliamentarians.
An interactive feature on how the build out of data centre infrastructure reshapes the fiscal and economic position of women. It connects the gendered division of digital labour, the incentives offered to attract these facilities, and the revenue and welfare consequences for the communities living alongside them. The question it puts is the one the investment narrative tends to leave unexamined: who bears the cost, and who is rendered invisible in the accounting.
Open the interactive feature →Four lines of work, each showing what has been built and where the digital economy meets the fiscal state. The published reports can be downloaded in full.
Multi-country work documenting the revenue foregone through tax incentives, the energy and water burdens that data centres place on host states, and the infrastructure costs they carry across selected jurisdictions.
Four interactive maps follow the digital economy from the ground up. They show where the minerals and metals that build digital infrastructure are found, what each of those minerals and metals does to power the economy of devices, chips, and data centres, where the cables run beneath Africa's waters and who owns them, and how data centres around the world are matched to the tax incentives granted to attract them. Select any map to open it.
Where the minerals and metals used to build digital infrastructure are found, mapped to the countries in which they are available.
Open map →What each critical mineral and metal is used for in powering the digital economy, from devices and chips to data centres and infrastructure.
Open map →Where the cables run beneath Africa's waters, who owns them, and whether African states charge any fees for the crossing.
Open map →Data centres around the world set against the tax incentives that governments have granted to attract them.
Open map →Two full length studies from the Technology Governance Working Group take the data centre as a material object before treating it as a fiscal one, tracing the minerals it is built from, the electricity and water it draws, and the tax treatment each host state applies to it. Both are published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence and may be downloaded in full.
Kenya · September 2026
The Unmeasured Grid
Infrastructure, environmental impact and taxation of data centres in Kenya, working component by component through the treatment of servers, cooling, backup power, software and real estate, and asking whether Kenya has a dedicated data centre tax regime at all.
Download report →
Tanzania · August 2026
Grounding the Cloud
The material, environmental and fiscal governance of data centres in Tanzania, mapping the eleven facilities in operation, their demands on the grid and on water, and the incentives, free zone rules and tariff treatment that shape what the state collects.
Download report →
Work analysing how algorithmic systems governing taxation, labour platforms, and welfare allocation render care labour and informal economies fiscally invisible, setting out accountability principles framed through a decolonial feminist political economy lens.
The argument is set out at length in a case study of SweepSouth, the Cape Town domestic cleaning platform, following a single contractual designation through the revenue authority, the unemployment fund, the compensation system and the social assistance agency, and naming the five mechanisms by which a working life becomes fiscally invisible.
A structured course built around the fiscalgorithmic, the point at which algorithmic design and fiscal consequence meet. It examines how the platforms that mediate work, welfare, and taxation encode bias, and how that bias removes people, disproportionately women and informal workers, from the view of the state. The first programme of its kind to treat algorithmic bias as a question of fiscal justice rather than technical performance alone.
Enter the course →This work will focus on co-developing a Data Centre Risk Assessment Framework in partnership with key stakeholders.
Procurement is where sandbox design meets the contract that actually binds the state. This discussion of Red Flags in Government Contracts sets out the warning signs that recur in agreements concluded between governments and private investors, and why they matter for the terms on which digital infrastructure is built and taxed.
Now that the interactive mapping is complete, a book project has begun on technology governance and fiscal design, examining data centres and their fiscal implications within the broader concerns of human rights, ecology and political economy. The work is in progress, drawing the strands of TERRA's research into a single sustained argument about how the governance of digital infrastructure distributes cost and benefit.
Project TERRA works alongside the institutions responsible for the fiscal and regulatory oversight of Kenya's digital sector, and with research and civic partners whose contributions shape its analysis. Its outputs are oriented towards African policy contexts while speaking to the wider global debate on technology governance and tax justice.
