Law, Value, and Inequality: Global Value Chains and the Governance of Cancer Genomic Data in Africa

Cancer genomics research in Africa operates through a fragmented global 
value chain: biospecimens are sourced locally, while sequencing, storage, analysis, and 
downstream innovation remain concentrated in Global North institutions. This article 
argues that Africa's "genomic data gap" is best understood not as a problem of absence, 
but as a problem of political economy: while biospecimens and clinical data are 
collected locally, the infrastructure required to convert them into scientific and 
commercial value remains concentrated elsewhere. Drawing on the IGLP Global Value 
Chain framework, the article treats law as constitutive of value chains, not a regulatory 
overlay, and asks how intellectual property (IP) law, contractual arrangements, and data 
governance structures determine who produces, controls, and benefits from genomic 
knowledge. Anchored in a case study of triple-negative breast cancer genomic data from 
Angolan and Cape Verdean women, it argues that the data gap is not strictly a technical 
deficiency, but a legally and politically produced outcome shaped by patents, contracts, 
and infrastructural dependencies over data ownership and circulation. Law thus 
functions as a constitutive technology of value creation, entrenching dependencies and 
reproducing colonial modalities of extraction. The article reframes the data gap as a 
governance outcome and reflects on legal arrangements for more equitable benefit-sharing

Dr Amaka Vanni is a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at the School of Law, 
University of Leeds. Her empirically grounded research draws on critical legal traditions, 
including Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), to explore how actors in 
the Global South, particularly in African and Afro-diasporic contexts, engage with and 
shape international intellectual property law and governance. Her work examines how 
international intellectual property regimes shape global inequalities and seeks to identify 
pathways towards more equitable forms of global economic governance.
Her award-winning book, Patent Games in the Global South: Pharmaceutical Patent 
Law-Making in Brazil, India and Nigeria (Hart, 2021), offers a distinctive account of 
global IP governance, showing how historical trajectories, social networks, and 
institutional relationships shape national approaches to implementing international 
intellectual property law. Her broader scholarship examines the implications of 
intellectual property for access to cancer medicines, the growing influence of donor 
actors in global economic governance, and the evolving relationship between 
intellectual property and technology start-ups in emerging markets. Interdisciplinary in 
orientation, her work engages audiences across legal history, public health, political 
economy, development studies, and global governance.