When the World Public Relations Forum convenes in Abuja from 15 to 21 November 2026, under the theme “Responsible Communication – The Voice of the World,” it will mark one of the most significant gatherings the Nigerian communication profession has ever hosted. That this is happening on Nigerian soil, under Nigerian stewardship, is not an accident. It reflects years of deliberate institution-building by the leadership of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations, under its president, Dr. Ike Neliaku, working alongside the international leadership of the Forum’s convening body, led by Professor Justin Green, the president of the Global Alliance, to position Nigeria as a credible host for a conversation the entire profession needs to have.
That effort deserves real commendation. Securing the right to host a gathering of this scale is diplomatic and institutional work of the highest order, and it says something important about where Nigerian public relations now stands globally. But hosting the conversation also comes with a responsibility to make sure Nigeria doesn’t merely provide the venue for a declaration on responsible communication, but visibly practices what that declaration will ask the rest of the world to commit to.
That responsibility is already being tested quietly, in the background, in the weeks leading up to the Forum itself.
The quiet test already under way
In the run-up to a gathering of this significance, it is entirely normal for the international bodies shaping its outcomes to consult widely, gathering the views of practitioners worldwide through structured surveys and benchmarking exercises that will inform whatever declaration or framework eventually emerges from Abuja. Several such consultations are already active, reaching Nigerian communication professionals directly. This is exactly as it should be: a declaration on responsible communication should be built from the ground up, with practitioners’ voices genuinely represented.
But here is the quiet test. These consultations, by their nature, collect personal data from Nigerian respondents, names, roles, sectors, professional opinions, and that data does not stay in Nigeria. It is typically hosted on servers abroad, processed by international platforms, and governed by privacy notices drafted with other jurisdictions primarily in mind. In at least two cases I have observed directly, some otherwise well-constructed global notices had simply not yet caught up with Nigeria’s own data protection framework.
This is not a scandal, and it should not be read as one. It is, instead, a genuinely useful and timely opportunity. A chance for the very process that will produce a declaration on responsible communication to demonstrate what responsible communication looks like in practice, before the ink is even dry.
The test Nigerian law actually sets
A common misconception among international organisers, sometimes with active participation of supposedly knowledgeable Nigerians, is that a jurisdiction’s data protection law does not apply once the data leaves the country. That assumption rests on a wrong premise. Under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, the deciding factor is not where a server sits, but where the data subject is. Section 2(2)(c) extends the Act’s reach to any controller, wherever domiciled, wherever operating, that processes the personal data of a person in Nigeria. The protection travels with the respondent, not the platform.
Once that is understood, the compliance path is straightforward rather than burdensome. For instance, if data collected from Nigerian respondents is hosted abroad, that is simply a cross-border transfer, and Sections 41 to 43 of the NDPA, together with the 2025 General Application and Implementation Directive, provide clear routes to legitimise it and include an adequacy determination, appropriate contractual safeguards, or informed consent where neither exists. Most credible international hosting providers already offer data processing terms that satisfy the second route. For most organisers, full compliance amounts to naming a safeguard they already have. It is simply one clear sentence in an existing notice.
Encouragingly, in the particular instance where this anomaly was raised through email by this author directly with an organiser running one such global benchmarking initiative under POPIA (SA) and GDPR (EU and UK) in recent weeks, the response was swift: a revised notice updated on September 25 was published within days, tightening its disclosures on hosting and data transfer. That is exactly the reflex our profession should model, not defensiveness, but responsiveness. It is proof that getting this right does not require months of legal wrangling. It requires awareness and professional confidence, on our part, and the will by organisers to act on it quickly.
A standard worth adopting broadly
Any global consultation reaching Nigerian professionals ahead of the Forum or, indeed, any international research exercise operating in Nigeria at any time, would do well to adopt five simple disciplines. They should name Nigeria’s data protection law alongside whatever other frameworks the notice already lists; disclose plainly where the data is hosted and under what safeguard it travels; commit to anonymising internal reference data on a defined schedule; protect small national or sector samples from being identifiable in published results, a point that matters especially for African respondents who are often a modest share of global datasets; and finally give every respondent one clear route to exercise their rights, naming the Nigeria Data Protection Commission alongside equivalent regulators elsewhere.
None of this is onerous. All of it is achievable before any consultation closes.
Beyond the Forum
There is a larger opportunity in front of Nigeria’s communication profession than getting one set of survey notices right. A declaration on responsible communication drafted in 2026 would be incomplete without a clear principle on responsible data because communicators today gather, analyse and act on personal data as routinely as they once crafted press releases, through audience research, social listening, AI-assisted monitoring and, yes, the very consultations now shaping this Forum’s outcomes. Nigeria’s communications profession delegation and its leadership are well placed to press for exactly that inclusion. But not as a footnote, but as a substantive commitment that communication professionals everywhere will respect the data protection rights of the people they engage, wherever those people are and wherever their data eventually comes to rest.
Luckily, the industry now has the growing expertise of an NDPC-licensed Data Protection Compliance Organisation and certified data protection officers who combine regulatory fluency with genuine communication practice. That expertise stands ready to support the Forum’s organisers, its partners, and any consultation still open, with a rapid privacy review before launch.
The Forum will ask the world’s communicators to lead responsibly for the next decade. Nigeria has the opportunity and, increasingly, the obligation to start showing what that looks like now, before the world arrives in Abuja to hear us say it.
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