Online violence happens in a specific digital landscape. RFLD’s report Online violence against women in West and Central Africa 2026 devotes a chapter to who is online in the region, and who is not. The picture helps explain why abuse lands so heavily on the women who do take part.
Internet use varies widely
Using DataReportal’s Digital 2026 figures, with data for October 2025, the report profiles connectivity in 15 of its 17 countries. Internet penetration ranges from 74.6% in Ghana to 13.2% in Chad. Nigeria has the largest online population, with 109 million internet users, a penetration rate of 45.5%.
Across Africa, the International Telecommunication Union reports that only 36% of people were online in 2025, against 74% worldwide. In its Africa regional report for 2024, the ITU found that 31% of women used the internet, against 43% of men.
A male online public sphere
DataReportal also reports the gender split of social media advertising audiences. This is not a measure of the digital divide in the strict sense. It is a useful indicator of how male the online public sphere is in each country.
The lowest female shares are in the Sahel and Togo:
- Niger: 19.9%
- Mali: 24.7%
- Chad: 27.3%
- Togo: 31.1%
- Burkina Faso: 31.2%
At the other end, Senegal is close to parity at 49.3%. Sierra Leone (45.9%) and Liberia (45.4%) follow closely.
In a country where four in five social media users are men, a woman who posts an opinion is highly visible. This imbalance helps explain the abuse women face when they speak up in politics or journalism.
The platforms that matter
Facebook has long dominated. In the 2020 Pollicy study, Facebook accounted for 71.2% of incidents of online violence reported by women in five African cities. In Benin, a 2025 WILDAF-AO report found that Facebook accounted for 62% of cases and WhatsApp for 21%.
The landscape is changing. TikTok is now the largest platform by adult reach in Nigeria and Guinea, as well as in the DRC and Chad. In Nigeria, Gatefield’s research found that X accounted for 34% of documented online harms, ahead of Facebook at 29%. Each platform has its own reporting tools and moderation capacity, which shapes the help survivors can get.
Why the landscape matters for policy
Connectivity is growing, and with it the number of women exposed to online abuse. The GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report 2026 puts the mobile internet gender gap in sub-Saharan Africa at 26% in 2025, down from 38% in 2018, with Nigeria’s gap also at 26%. The smartphone ownership gap stands at 22%. Two lessons follow.
First, closing the digital gender gap and preventing online violence go together. The African Commission’s Resolution 522 calls on states both to legislate against digital violence and to widen women’s access to digital and technology education. Connecting more women without making online spaces safer risks pushing many of them back offline.
Second, policy needs country-specific data. A national response in Senegal, where women are close to half of the social media audience, will look different from one in Niger, where they are one in five.
Data limits
DataReportal figures for Cameroon and Gabon could not be retrieved for the report. No sex-disaggregated ITU figure for Africa’s internet use in 2025 could be found. The report flags these gaps openly. Cameroon and Gabon are still covered in the report’s legal and institutional profiles, and their connectivity figures can be added once they become available.
For the legal side of each country’s profile, see RFLD’s women’s rights laws pages. The full connectivity table is in chapter 3 of the report, alongside the legal and institutional profile of each country.
For RFLD members, these figures help target their work. Digital safety training reaches more women where they are already online, and advocacy for access matters most where women are still a small minority of users.
About the report
This article draws on RFLD’s report Online violence against women in West and Central Africa 2026, published on 4 October 2026. Read the summary, download the English edition or the French edition.
