Africa's digital landscape — promise and repression.
Africa's digital landscape empowers civic mobilisation while enabling state repression. Across the continent, governments deploy military-grade spyware — Pegasus, Predator — and impose internet shutdowns during elections and protests. AI-driven disinformation threatens the integrity of public information ecosystems. And crucially, this repression is gendered: Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence is used as a deliberate political tactic to silence women in public life.
NAFASI advances on three fronts — pushing for laws that protect digital rights, building practical capacity for those most exposed, and connecting fragmented digital activism into a coordinated continental network. The initiative's overall objective is to secure Africa's digital democracy against state repression and corporate technology misuse — by equipping civil society with resilient, sovereign infrastructure and cybersecurity capacity.
Within that strategic frame, RFLD's role is the Feminist & Francophone Bridge — leveraging continental presence to ensure interventions are gender-responsive and inclusive of francophone West and Central Africa, with a specialised mandate for high-level diplomatic advocacy, protection of Women Human Rights Defenders, and gender mainstreaming to counter TFGBV.
Space — online and off — for civil society to do its work.
NAFASI is the Swahili word for space. The initiative is a continental commitment to defend the space — online and offline — where civil society, journalists, and women human rights defenders do their work. RFLD's role within that commitment is to make sure the space defended is gender-just, francophone-equitable, and grounded in community.