December 9, 2025 | By African Feminist Hub (RFLD)
On December 9, 2025, the African Feminist Hub (RFLD) participated in a landmark United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Regional Dialogue addressing one of the most pressing human rights challenges facing our continent: digital violence against women and girls. Our Director, Mme Agueh Dossi Sekonnou Gloria, joined leading voices from across Africa in the webinar “UNiTE to End Digital Violence Against All Women and Girls,” convened as part of the global 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence campaign.
Speaking to an audience of policymakers, civil society leaders, UN agencies, and women’s rights organizations across the African continent, Gloria brought the voices, experiences, and expertise of thousands of women human rights defenders we represent through our pan-African networks. Her message was clear: digital violence is not a virtual problem—it has devastating real-world consequences that threaten the future leadership, economic participation, and democratic engagement of young African women.
The 2025 theme for the 16 Days of Activism—“UNiTE to End Digital Violence Against All Women and Girls”—recognizes a fundamental shift in how gender-based violence manifests in the 21st century. As Africa experiences rapid digital transformation, with internet penetration growing faster than any other region globally, the opportunities for education, economic empowerment, political participation, and social connection have expanded exponentially. However, this digital revolution has brought with it a parallel epidemic of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) that threatens to exclude women and girls from the very spaces that should be liberating them.
For the RFLD, this issue sits at the intersection of all seven of our core programmatic areas: strengthening civil society organizations, empowering individuals and communities, promoting women’s rights, protecting civil liberties, reinforcing digital/civic/media environments, providing sub-grants for gender justice, and building organizational capacity. Our work across sub-Saharan Africa—particularly in francophone West and Central Africa—has given us unique insights into how digital violence operates, who it targets, and what solutions can work when they are properly resourced and led by African women themselves.
The UNDP Regional Dialogue brought together critical voices to examine this crisis from multiple angles. Alongside Gloria’s focus on young women and girls’ safety in digital spaces, the panel included:
- Ms. Sally Ncube (Equality Now, Regional Representative Southern Africa) discussing legal and policy reforms
- Ms. Hajaratu Bangura (She Leads, Regional Representative) presenting assessments of online sexual exploitation and abuse
- Ms. Faizat Badmus-Busari (SIHA Network, Regional Programme Manager) addressing digital violence in crisis contexts
This multi-stakeholder approach reflected the reality that ending digital violence requires coordinated action across legal frameworks, grassroots organizing, humanitarian response, and feminist movement building.
Gloria opened her intervention by presenting evidence that should alarm anyone concerned about Africa’s development trajectory. The statistics are not merely numbers—they represent millions of young African women whose potential is being stifled, whose voices are being silenced, and whose safety is being compromised:
58% of African girls aged 15-25 have experienced online harassment. This figure, drawn from research by Plan International, reveals that digital violence is not an isolated phenomenon affecting a small minority—it is a systematic pattern affecting the majority of young women who venture into digital spaces. These are not abstract victims; they are students seeking educational resources, entrepreneurs building businesses, activists advocating for their communities, artists sharing their creativity, and young women simply trying to connect with peers.
28% of women in sub-Saharan Africa have faced digital violence. Research across Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, and South Africa shows that the most common forms include sexual harassment (36%), name-calling (33%), and stalking (26%). These violations occur across all major platforms—Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter/X, Instagram, and TikTok—demonstrating that the problem is systemic rather than platform-specific.
1.8 billion women worldwide lack adequate legal protection against digital violence, according to World Bank data, with the majority living in Africa. This legal vacuum creates an environment of total impunity where perpetrators face no consequences for harassment, threats, doxxing, sextortion, or coordinated attacks against women.
73% of women journalists have experienced online violence, according to UNESCO research. These attacks are not random—they are designed to silence women who dare to report on corruption, challenge power structures, or simply be visible in public discourse. The chilling effect extends far beyond individual journalists to impact press freedom and democratic accountability across our continent.
46% of female parliamentarians in Africa have faced sexist online attacks. When women in political leadership face coordinated campaigns of abuse, the message is clear: women do not belong in power. This directly undermines our democratic systems and deprives our nations of diverse leadership.
90% of young people in Nairobi, Kenya, report experiencing technology-facilitated gender-based violence, highlighting how urban youth—particularly young women—navigate hostile digital environments daily. Similar patterns emerge across African cities from Lagos to Johannesburg, from Dakar to Addis Ababa.
75% of urban refugee women in Uganda experience digital violence. This statistic illuminates the intersectional nature of digital abuse—women who are already marginalized by displacement, economic precarity, and xenophobia face compounded vulnerabilities in digital spaces.
Beyond these statistics, Gloria shared concrete examples that humanize the crisis. The case of Miss Côte d’Ivoire 2023 exemplifies how visibility becomes a trigger for coordinated violence. When a talented young woman achieved public recognition, she was immediately subjected to vicious attacks on her appearance, intelligence, and sexuality. The harassment escalated from online platforms into physical spaces, forcing her to limit her movements and activities. This pattern—digital violence escalating into offline harm—occurs repeatedly across our continent, sometimes with fatal consequences.
During her intervention, Gloria emphasized that digital violence against African women takes numerous interconnected forms, each with distinct characteristics but often occurring simultaneously:
Cyberbullying and harassment involve persistent patterns of abusive messages, comments, and posts designed to humiliate, intimidate, or demean women. Unlike offline bullying, digital harassment follows victims everywhere—into their homes, their workplaces, their moments of rest—creating an inescapable environment of hostility.
Sexual harassment online ranges from unsolicited explicit images and messages to graphic sexual threats and demands. Research shows that 38% of African women on WhatsApp receive unwanted explicit content, transforming communication tools into vectors of sexual violence.
Stalking and monitoring involve perpetrators tracking women’s digital activities, locations, relationships, and communications. GPS tracking, spyware, and unauthorized account access allow abusers to maintain control even after physical separation.
Doxxing—the malicious publication of private information including home addresses, phone numbers, workplace details, and family information—has become a weapon of choice against women activists, journalists, and public figures. In Senegal, an epidemic of doxxing has targeted women journalists, putting their physical safety at immediate risk.
Sextortion combines sexual exploitation with extortion, typically involving threats to share intimate images unless victims comply with demands for money, sexual acts, or continued production of exploitative content. Young women and girls are particularly vulnerable to these schemes.
Coordinated attacks represent a particularly insidious form of digital violence where organized groups target individual women with waves of abuse, threats, and harassment. These campaigns often involve bot networks, coordinated hashtags, and cross-platform mobilization designed to overwhelm and silence targets.
Image-based abuse including non-consensual distribution of intimate images and the creation of deepfake pornography targeting women has exploded with advances in AI technology. Research shows that 90-95% of deepfakes are sexually explicit and target women.
The common thread linking all these forms of violence is their purpose: to exclude, silence, control, and punish women for being visible, vocal, ambitious, or simply present in digital spaces. The ultimate goal is to force women’s retreat from the digital public sphere, thereby excluding them from the economic, educational, political, and social opportunities that digital participation enables.
Gloria’s intervention went beyond cataloging forms of violence to analyze the structural conditions that enable and perpetuate digital violence against African women. These systemic barriers must be addressed if we are to achieve lasting change:
1. The Legal Protection Gap
The fact that 1.8 billion women lack adequate legal protection against digital violence reflects a fundamental failure of governance. Many African countries still operate under legal frameworks developed before the internet era, lacking specific provisions to address cyberstalking, online harassment, revenge porn, or sextortion. Even where laws exist, enforcement capacity is often inadequate due to limited training, resources, and political will within law enforcement and judicial systems.
However, progress is possible. Malawi’s recent criminalization of digital gender-based violence demonstrates that African nations can lead in developing comprehensive legal frameworks. Tunisia and Morocco have also taken concrete legislative steps. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights Resolution 522 (2022) provides a regional framework that all member states should implement. The challenge now is translating these normative advances into consistent, enforceable protections across the continent.
2. Platform Accountability Failures
The major technology platforms operating in Africa have systematically failed to protect African women users. This failure manifests in several critical ways:
Language neglect: Content moderation systems prioritize English and other Global North languages, leaving French, Swahili, Hausa, Amharic, Wolof, and hundreds of other African languages with minimal or no automated moderation. This means that harassment, threats, and hate speech targeting African women in their own languages often goes undetected and unaddressed.
Slower response times: Research consistently shows that reports of abuse from African users receive slower responses and lower priority than reports from users in wealthy nations. This creates a two-tiered system where African women’s safety matters less than that of users in Europe or North America.
Context ignorance: Platform policies are designed without meaningful consultation with African women’s organizations, resulting in rules that fail to account for cultural contexts, linguistic nuances, or specific patterns of gender-based violence prevalent in African societies.
Extractive economics: Gloria termed this “digital colonialism”—platforms extract enormous value from African users’ data and engagement while externalizing the costs of violence and harm onto African women and communities. They profit without protecting.
3. The Digital Literacy and Training Gap
Across Africa, formal education systems have failed to integrate digital safety, online rights, and technology literacy into curricula. Young people—particularly young women—navigate complex digital environments without adequate preparation for the risks they will face. Civil society organizations, including RFLD, work to fill this gap, but these efforts reach only a fraction of those who need support and operate on inadequate and insecure funding.
4. Intersectional Discrimination
Digital violence does not affect all African women equally. Those facing multiple, intersecting marginalized identities experience compounded vulnerability and more severe forms of abuse:
Refugee and displaced women, as demonstrated by the 75% figure from Uganda, face xenophobia and exploitation amplified in digital spaces. Their precarious legal status and economic vulnerability make them prime targets for sextortion and trafficking schemes.
LGBTQI+ women face targeted campaigns of outing, harassment, and incitement to violence in contexts where same-sex relationships are criminalized or socially stigmatized. Digital violence becomes a tool of homophobic persecution.
Women with disabilities encounter both ableist harassment and heightened vulnerability to certain forms of digital violence, while often having reduced access to support services.
Rural and low-income women may lack the devices, connectivity, or digital literacy to employ safety measures, making them more vulnerable to exploitation when they do access digital spaces.
Women in crisis and humanitarian contexts face compounded risks as displacement, conflict, and disaster erode protective social structures while increasing dependence on digital communication for aid access, family contact, and information.
5. Culture of Victim-Blaming
Perhaps the most insidious barrier is the persistent culture that holds women responsible for the violence they experience. When a young woman faces harassment, the response is often: “Why did you post that photo?” “Why are you on that platform?” “What did you expect?” This victim-blaming culture keeps survivors silent, protects perpetrators, and normalizes violence. Young girls internalize these messages, coming to believe that digital violence is simply “normal” and something they must accept as the price of participation.
Gloria emphasized that the consequences of digital violence extend far beyond individual experiences of harm—they threaten Africa’s development trajectory by systematically excluding young women from leadership, economic participation, and civic engagement:
Self-censorship and withdrawal become survival strategies. Women limit what they post, who they connect with, which platforms they use, and how visible they allow themselves to be. Some retreat from digital spaces entirely. While this may provide temporary safety, it comes at enormous cost—lost educational opportunities, abandoned businesses, silenced voices, and broken networks of solidarity.
Economic exclusion results when women entrepreneurs face harassment that forces them offline. In Malawi, RFLD research documented women abandoning profitable online businesses after sustained harassment. Across the continent, women lose income, customers, and economic opportunities because digital spaces are hostile and unsafe.
Educational deprivation occurs when female students face harassment in online learning environments, academic social media, or educational platforms. During COVID-19 lockdowns, when education moved online, many girls dropped out rather than continue facing harassment in virtual classrooms.
Political dissuasion is perhaps the most strategic impact—coordinated attacks against young women activists, politicians, and community leaders send a clear message that women do not belong in public leadership. When 42% of female parliamentarians face digital attacks, and when young women activists experience waves of abuse for speaking out, the chilling effect ripples across an entire generation of potential leaders.
Psychological trauma including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress affects survivors of digital violence at rates comparable to offline violence. The mental health impacts are real, severe, and often long-lasting, yet mental health support services specifically addressing digital violence remain scarce across Africa.
Isolation and broken solidarity occur when digital violence succeeds in fragmenting women’s networks. When women cannot safely organize, communicate, and build movements online, our collective power is diminished. The feminist movement depends on connection—digital violence is an attack on feminist organizing itself.
Gloria posed a critical question to the UNDP audience: “How can Africa realize its potential when we systematically exclude half our population—and specifically our youngest, most digitally native generation—from the spaces where innovation, organization, commerce, and discourse increasingly occur?” Young African women are not simply victims requiring protection; they are the entrepreneurs, activists, artists, scientists, and leaders who will shape Africa’s 21st century. Their exclusion from digital spaces is Africa’s loss.
A core message throughout Gloria’s intervention was that African women are not passive victims awaiting rescue—we are innovators, organizers, and leaders developing sophisticated responses to digital violence. The challenge is not a lack of solutions but rather insufficient resources and political will to support and scale the work that African women’s organizations are already doing.
RFLD’s Comprehensive Programming
Gloria detailed how RFLD’s own work embodies a holistic approach to digital safety and rights:
Our civil society strengthening program builds coalitions among organizations working on digital rights, ensuring we act collectively rather than in isolation. Our individual and community empowerment program includes digital literacy and online safety training specifically designed for young women and girls. Our women’s rights programming recognizes that sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) now includes freedom from digital violence, and that meaningful political participation requires safe digital spaces.
Through our civil liberties protection work, we defend freedom of expression while making clear that violence is not speech—women’s right to speak without facing harassment is fundamental to democratic values. Our digital, civic, and media environment reinforcement program conducts advocacy for digital rights, campaigns for platform accountability, provides security training, combats disinformation, and supports media freedom and journalist safety online.
Our sub-grants program enables rapid response support to grassroots initiatives and individual human rights defenders facing digital attacks. Our capacity building program equips organizations with skills in digital security, violence documentation, and policy advocacy.
Gloria concluded her intervention with specific, actionable recommendations for different stakeholders:
For African Governments:
- Adopt comprehensive legislation specifically addressing all forms of digital violence, following models from Malawi, Tunisia, and Morocco
- Implement the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights Resolution 522 (2022) with concrete action plans and resource allocation
- Ratify and implement the African Union Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls (2025) which explicitly recognizes violence in cyberspace
- Establish specialized units within law enforcement trained on digital violence investigation and survivor-centered response
- Create fast-track courts for digital violence cases to ensure timely justice
- Integrate digital safety education into national curricula at all levels
- Mandate platform accountability through national regulations requiring transparency, local language moderation, and partnership with women’s organizations
- Consult with and fund feminist organizations in all policy development related to digital spaces
For Technology Platforms:
- Invest massively in African language content moderation with teams trained in gender-based violence and cultural contexts
- Develop Africa-specific safety features designed in consultation with African women’s organizations
- Provide transparent data on prevalence, reporting, and response to digital violence against African women users
- Fund African women’s organizations rather than attempting to replace their expertise with corporate initiatives
- End extractive practices that profit from African users while failing to protect them
- Establish meaningful accountability mechanisms including independent oversight and survivor input into policy development
For UN Agencies and International Donors:
- Dramatically increase funding for African women’s digital rights organizations with long-term institutional support rather than short-term projects
- Provide flexible, rapid response grants for organizations supporting survivors and responding to attacks
- Trust African feminist leadership rather than imposing external approaches
- Support both advocacy and service delivery recognizing that both are essential
- Fund documentation and research conducted by African women’s organizations to build the evidence base for policy change
- Support regional network building recognizing that digital violence crosses borders and requires coordinated regional response
For Civil Society:
- Strengthen regional networks and coalitions for collective action
- Document cases systematically to build evidence for advocacy
- Demand accountability from all stakeholders
- Provide holistic support to survivors including legal, psychosocial, economic, and digital security assistance
- Build intergenerational solidarity linking experienced activists with young women leaders
- Center survivor voices in all advocacy and program development
- Develop Pan-African strategies that address cross-border dimensions of digital violence
For All Stakeholders:
Recognize that digital violence is real violence with real consequences. It is not less serious because it occurs through screens. Young African women’s digital sovereignty is essential to our continent’s democratic and economic future. Their exclusion is not a women’s issue—it is an Africa issue. African solutions exist and are effective when properly resourced. The primary barrier is not knowledge but political will and investment.
Gloria’s closing message offered both challenge and hope: “Feminist digital sovereignty for young African women is not a utopia—it is an achievable goal. We have the knowledge, the strategies, and the leadership. What is missing is the political will and the resources to support the solutions that we are already implementing.”
This vision of feminist digital sovereignty includes:
Safe spaces where young African women can learn, work, create, organize, and connect without fear of harassment, surveillance, or violence.
Legal protection that recognizes digital violence as real violence and provides effective recourse to survivors across all African nations.
Platform accountability that ensures technology companies serve African women users rather than exploiting them.
Economic opportunity where women can build businesses, access markets, and generate income online without facing gender-based harassment that drives them offline.
Political participation where young women can engage in activism, run for office, and exercise leadership without coordinated digital attacks designed to silence them.
Cultural transformation that rejects victim-blaming and instead holds perpetrators and enabling systems accountable.
Movement building where African feminist organizations have the resources, capacity, and solidarity to sustain long-term struggles for digital justice.
Innovation and creativity where young African women can develop the technologies, platforms, and digital cultures that reflect our values and serve our communities.
This vision is not abstract or impossible. Organizations like RFLD and our partners across Africa are building it piece by piece through our daily work. We see it when a young woman we trained successfully protects herself online. We see it when a coalition we helped build wins policy change. We see it when a survivor we supported obtains justice. We see it when platforms respond to our advocacy by improving their systems. We see it when governments consult us in policy development.
The UNDP Regional Dialogue was not an endpoint but a milestone in RFLD’s ongoing commitment to ensuring African women’s digital rights and safety. Since our founding on January 1, 2012, we have worked to strengthen communities and advance gender justice, human rights, and civic spaces across sub-Saharan Africa. Digital environments are now central to all these areas—civic spaces are increasingly digital, gender justice requires digital safety, and human rights include digital rights.
As we move forward from this important dialogue, RFLD commits to:
Continuing and expanding our digital security training for young women and women human rights defenders across our networks.
Intensifying our advocacy with governments, regional bodies, and international institutions for comprehensive legal frameworks and platform accountability.
Strengthening our coalitions with sister organizations across Africa working on digital rights, women’s rights, and freedom of expression.
Supporting survivors through our sub-grants program and partnerships with legal aid and psychosocial support providers.
Building evidence through documentation and research on digital violence patterns, impacts, and effective responses in African contexts.
Amplifying young women’s voices in policy discussions and ensuring that those most affected by digital violence shape the solutions.
Developing innovative approaches to digital literacy, online organizing, and safe platform alternatives that center African women’s needs and values.
Holding all stakeholders accountable for their commitments to ending digital violence against women and girls.
We close with an invitation to solidarity. Ending digital violence against African women and girls requires all of us—organizations, activists, governments, platforms, donors, researchers, journalists, artists, and the millions of African women and allies who believe that another digital world is possible.
If you are a young woman or girl facing digital violence, know that you are not alone and it is not your fault. Organizations like RFLD and our partners are here to support you. If you are an activist or organization working on these issues, reach out to us for partnership, coalition building, and mutual support. If you are a donor or funder, invest in African women’s digital rights organizations with flexible, long-term, and survivor-centered funding. If you are a policymaker, consult with and genuinely listen to feminist organizations as you develop digital policies. If you are a platform employee, use your position to advocate for better protection of African women users. If you are a journalist, report on digital violence with sensitivity and accuracy that centers survivors’ voices while avoiding sensationalism.
Together, we can build the digital spaces our daughters deserve—spaces where they can learn without harassment, work without threats, organize without surveillance, create without violation, and lead without punishment. This is not just a dream; it is a commitment, a strategy, and an achievable future.
The future is feminist. The future is African. The future is digital. And the future begins with ending digital violence now.
RFLD
Founded in 2012, the Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD), the African Feminist Hub is a pan-African organization based in West Africa, representing thousands of women human rights defenders across sub-Saharan Africa. We strengthen communities and advance gender justice, human rights, and civic spaces through seven integrated programs: civil society strengthening, individual and community empowerment, women’s rights promotion, civil liberties protection, digital/civic/media environment reinforcement, sub-grants for gender justice, and organizational capacity building.
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