‘Technology-facilitated gender-based violence is not a side effect of digital growth. It is the price women pay for being online.’
In early 2025, researchers monitoring elections in Africa uncovered a wave of AI-generated deepfake videos targeting female journalists and female candidates in Ghana, Senegal and Namibia — synthetic clips designed to humiliate and discredit them, and drive them offline. The attack was chillingly effective, reflecting a wider pattern in which technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) silences women’s voices at precisely the moments when they most need to be heard.
A global survey published in April highlights the scale of the problem. More than half of women entrepreneurs in low- and middle-income countries report online harassment, and four in ten have withdrawn from public life to protect themselves. Among women journalists, the situation is even worse, with nearly three-quarters saying they have endured abuse that is often linked to disinformation and deepfakes.
Yet most digital platforms still only take action on safety once harm has already occurred, treating protection as an add-on rather than a core function. Safety by design turns that approach on its head by embedding privacy, consent and abuse detection into the code and business rules from the outset.
What exactly is TFGBV — and why is “Safety by Design” important?
Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is “any act that is committed, aided, aggravated or amplified through digital tools and ICTs, which results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, psychological, social, political or economic harm.” It ranges from image-based abuse, deep-fake pornography and sextortion to doxxing, cyberstalking, hate speech and gendered disinformation. Because the content can be replicated, searched for and shared indefinitely, the harm can be carried across platforms and persists over time, blurring the line between “online” and “offline” abuse.
A United Nations Women survey found that 58 per cent of girls and young women have experienced at least one form of online harassment, often before they turn twenty-five. In Kenya, a 2024 study of university students found that almost 90 per cent had witnessed technology-facilitated abuse on campus social media feeds, and nearly four in ten had been targets themselves. These figures point to a crisis in which victims frequently respond by self-censoring, withdrawing from public life and missing out on economic or political opportunities, which in turn stifles diverse voices in civic discourse.
And that is why Safety by Design matters. The Australian eSafety Commissioner defines Safety by Design as placing “user safety and rights at the centre of product development”, encouraging companies to anticipate, detect and eliminate online harms before they occur, rather than “moving fast and breaking things”. Safety by Design provides a common vocabulary and measurable benchmarks for safety. In short, it shifts the prevention of TFGBV from an afterthought to a design requirement – the digital equivalent of fitting seatbelts in every car. Responsibility extends across the entire ecosystem, encompassing platforms, regulators, developers and civic groups, rather than resting solely on engineers.
The role of technology developers and civil society
Civil society is often the first port of call for survivors and the last line of accountability when companies or states fail to deliver. Across Africa, feminist tech collectives, digital rights NGOs and faith-based survivor networks are turning lived experience into data, tools and concrete policy achievements, whilst joining forces with global coalitions to gain greater influence.
Trainers from the Safe Sisters network in East Africa travel from market towns to radio stations, teaching women journalists how to spot spyware and store evidence in the cloud.
The South African developers behind the GRIT mobile app are demonstrating what safety-first engineering looks like in practice. Following discussions with survivors of domestic violence, the team built an encrypted vault that allows users to record evidence and store court details in a cloud storage space that only they can access. This feature has pushed the app’s download figures past 10,000, and prosecutors say the secure files are already strengthening cases in Johannesburg courts.
In Kampala, Uganda, a feminist civic tech group called Pollicy has taken a different approach. Its ‘Digital Safe Tea’ game guides players through a choose-your-own-adventure story in which online harassment and doxxing emerge as plot twists. Every decision a player makes is logged anonymously, and the dataset is shared with local start-ups so they can address design flaws before the product is launched. Ugandan university clubs now use the game in digital safety workshops.
These local initiatives draw on a global handbook. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner publishes an open-access ‘Safety by Design’ toolkit that guides developers through risk assessments and ‘privacy by default’ settings. Kenyan regulators cite the same resource in a draft regulation that would require all new social media apps to submit safety assessments prior to launch. As African developers adopt this framework, the hope is that every upload button and contact list will incorporate built-in safeguards long before any threats emerge.
The role of social media platforms
Social media platforms claim they are creating safer news feeds, yet the focus has now shifted to what they are doing specifically for African users.
TikTok took a public step last year when it launched a Sub-Saharan Africa Safety Advisory Council in Nairobi and asked lawyers, journalists and digital rights advocates from Kenya, Ghana, Senegal and South Africa to review every policy change before code updates are rolled out. Council members meet quarterly and publish minutes so that watchdog groups can monitor whether recommendations are implemented in product updates.
Regional apps are following suit. Ayoba, the chat and content service backed by MTN, has updated its servers to screen every photo against a list of banned images provided by domestic gender rights groups. Engineers say the check takes just milliseconds and blocks non-consensual intimate images before anyone can forward them. Users who report missed content now see faster takedowns as the filter learns from each report.
African survivors are also tapping into a global safety net. Stop NCII, a tool developed by an alliance led by Meta, allows victims to create a digital fingerprint of an intimate photo without uploading the file. That fingerprint is shared with dozens of platforms, which then block any upload that matches it.
The role of governments
Ghana has been at the forefront of preventing TFGBV since its Cybersecurity Act came into force in 2020, making the sharing of intimate images without consent a criminal offence punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment. South Africa soon followed with its Cybercrimes Act, which makes revenge pornography illegal and imposes the same duty of care on anyone who reposts such material. Kenya is currently holding public hearings on draft rules for children’s online safety that would require every social media platform and messaging app to submit a safety impact assessment before launch.
Regional bodies want these national initiatives to complement one another. The African Union (AU) Child Online Safety and Empowerment Policy, adopted last year, calls on all member states to enshrine corporate obligations in law and to publish public dashboards that track the speed of content removal and language coverage.
Criminal laws set the minimum standard, but design requirements and transparency measures raise the bar. When African legislatures combine Ghana-style laws on image abuse with Kenya-style risk-assessment obligations and measure progress against AU benchmarks, platforms have no leeway to treat safeguards against TFGBV as an optional extra. Borrowing proven mechanisms from Australia’s Online Safety Act can speed up the process, ensuring that every new feature launched is safe by default, regardless of which continent develops it.
Technology-facilitated gender-based violence is not a side effect of digital growth. It is the price women pay for being online.
The good news is that every piece of Africa’s ‘safety-by-design’ puzzle is finally on the table. From Lagos to Nairobi, developers are building privacy safeguards into the code, platforms are bringing African experts into the decision-making process, governments are embedding design requirements into licences and AU policy, and civil society networks are feeding survivor data directly into product development cycles and policy drafts. It is only through such pan-African collaboration and follow-through that Africa may be able to reduce online gender-based violence.
Written by
Cecilia Maundu
Source: https://globalvoices.org/
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