From Policy to Practice: African Practitioners' Perspectives on Benefit-Sharing Governance in the Age of DSI, AI, and the Bilateral-Multilateral Crossroads

Global governance of digital sequence information (DSI) has concentrated almost exclusively on publicly accessible repositories, leaving a commercially significant share of genetic data generated within private, proprietary biodiscovery platforms largely outside multilateral benefit-sharing frameworks. Drawing on over two decades of practitioner experience in Nagoya Protocol implementation, the DSI Multilateral Mechanism, and bilateral Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) negotiations across Africa, this commentary argues that bilateral ABS agreements remain one of the key mechanisms providing the legal specificity and enforceability needed to govern biodiversity genetic resources (GR) and DSI, and to maintain a direct economic relationship between resource users and providers. Using case evidence from Basecamp Research's operational ABS partnerships across more than 30 countries, together with national implementation experience in Malawi and Cameroon, we show that bilateral frameworks generate accountability and sustained investment that multilateral, voluntary mechanisms structurally lack. We address the principal counterargument to this position that benefit-sharing obligations impede emergency research and show that post-pandemic reforms reinforce rather than undermine the case for benefit-sharing. We further examine the governance challenge posed by AI-driven biodiscovery, where provenance-linked training data offers a model for extending ABS compliance into algorithmic and AI-derived value chains. We conclude that bilateral and multilateral mechanisms are complementary rather than competing architectures, and that operationalising Article 10 of the Nagoya Protocol, alongside mandatory DSI provenance tracking, offers a practical path to closing the governance gap under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. We position Africa not as a passive subject of DSI governance debates but as an active architect of the equitable frameworks needed for a sustainable global bioeconomy. Executive Summary Bilateral Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) agreements under the Nagoya Protocol remain a vital mechanism for the fair and equitable use of genetic resources and associated digital sequence information (DSI), particularly in commercial research contexts and for privately held DSI databases. While multilateral mechanisms are being proposed to manage publicly accessible DSI, they remove the direct economic relationship between User and Provider and therefore cannot fully substitute for the flexibility and contextual specificity offered by well-designed bilateral arrangements. Implementing equitable ABS requires building sovereign capability, not merely enacting legal frameworks (Dutfield, 2011); capacity-building through technology transfer, intellectual property, and academic collaboration is the foundational engine of a sustainable bioeconomy, not a charitable add-on (Nnadozie et al., 2017). Drawing on over two decades of practitioner experience including the facilitation of bilateral arrangements and service within the Nagoya Protocol and the Global Biodiversity Framework, this paper presents evidence from Basecamp Research's private, public, and community commercial research collaborations across Africa and beyond. Real-world examples from East, Central, and Southern Africa demonstrate that tailored bilateral agreements provide the most robust protection for local communities, protected areas, and academic institutions, ensuring that benefit-sharing obligations remain legally enforceable throughout the commercial research value chain. Africa is not merely a provider of genetic resources; it is an active architect of equitable biodiversity governance, developing practical ABS solutions that the global policy community urgently needs to learn from.