ARTICLE 19 Senegal and West Africa reaffirms its commitment to protecting women’s rights in the digital age and calls on governments across Africa to urgently strengthen the African Union Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls. The Convention is the first treaty focused specifically on ending violence against women and girls in Africa, setting an important standard to guide the fight against gender-based violence. However, in order to ensure the protection of freedom of expression for women and girls in a rapidly developing digital world, it must explicitly address technology-facilitated violence and hold governments, tech companies, and platforms accountable.
This year’s UN-led 16 Days of Activism urged civil society, governments, and the public to ‘rally for a world where technology is a force for equality – not harm’. Activists around the world highlighted the threats and dangers women and girls face online, and promoted their empowerment in the face of harassment, abuse and control. Beyond the 16 days, which take place from 25 November to 10 December annually, ARTICLE 19 Senegal and West Africa’s resolve to protect women’s rights remains resolute.
Across Africa, digital spaces have become essential for women journalists, activists, and women and girls in general to share information, challenge injustice, and hold power to account. Yet technology-facilitated violence, which includes online harassment and abuse, threats, doxxing, and non-consensual intimate imagery, threatens to silence women’s voices.
Throughout the region, we have witnessed how technology-facilitated violence restricts freedom of expression by instilling fear and enabling discrimination, leading to self-censorship and forcing women offline.
The African Union’s Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls (AU CEVAWG), adopted in 2025, recognises the importance of protecting women in ‘cyberspace’ but falls short of fully addressing the unique dangers women face in digital environments. It treats technology-facilitated violence as only one of among many locations of harm and places accountability mainly on states, without sufficiently involving digital platforms or providing strong enforcement.
In order to address these shortcomings, we urge the African Union and member states to take action through the #Pauseforpurpose campaign, which encourages critical analyse of the Convention, and for all stakeholders to assess whether it is fit for purpose. The campaign focuses on political engagement, education, advocacy, and collaboration.
We urge the Union to use this opportunity to strengthen the Convention by:
- Explicitly recognising technology-facilitated violence as a core issue and threat to freedom of expression and democratic participation.
- Demanding clear accountability from tech companies to address this problem, including more transparency about their use of algorithms to detect various types of technology-facilitated violence, provide more essential information, and explain to the public how their algorithms are used to present, rank, promote or demote content.
- Guaranteeing legal frameworks and procedures that support survivors, enable rapid responses to violations, and ensure access to justice that is free from stigma and barriers.
- Ensuring robust monitoring and enforcement mechanisms so commitments are met and rights upheld.
- Collaborating across governments, civil society, and the private sector to promote digital literacy, raise awareness ofn the harms of technology-facilitated violence, and empower women as equal participants in the digital public sphere.
We stand with partners on the #Pauseforpurpose campaign, ready to support the stakeholders in reviewing the Convention, proposing in more detail the scope of these changes and putting them in practice in years to come. Women and girls in Africa must be able to speak online without being attacked and silenced, and this Convention must be fixed to make that real.
We believe that strong regional standards are the backbone of comprehensive protections, so freedom of expression of women and girls is defended across the region.
For more information, please contact Janet Gbam, Senior Digital Programmes Officer: [email protected]