Africa

The annual Forum on Internet Freedom, Africa brings together people from across the African continent to to deliberate on gaps, concerns and opportunities for advancing privacy, access to information, free expression, non-discrimination and the free flow of information online on the continent. But what about gender perspectives? 

How to start a sex-positive conversation around queerness, sensuality and sexuality, gender expression, and even violence? HOLAAfrica is one platform that shows us how to do it. From pleasure manuals to podcasts to articles, the platform raises and discusses several sensitive issues and concerns relevant to African women, gender non-conforming persons and sexual minorities.

Equity in digital access in Africa is far from being a reality. There is also paucity of women in technology related careers and more broadly in STEM. In this column, Nodumo Dhlamini will explore the necessity for mentoring of women to make them confident users and implementers of ICT tools and solutions.

In Tanzania, even as access to internet has brought changes to the lives of people, there is still a lot to be done to get everyone connected and at the same time ensuring good policies to lay the ground for a safer internet. Rebecca explores legal options to the non consensual sharing of intimate images of women in the country. 

The emerging sub-field of research around gender and digital technology is united in its understanding that gender biases and stereotypes are embedded in technology, and that this reproduces the existing problems around gender parity, gender-based violence, discrimination and exclusion on the internet. This report is a mapping of the research around gender and digital technology in the decade…

The women of Democratic Republic of Congo have been part of shaping the civic spaces for years, leading to the freedom of the country to now highlighting major rights-based issues. But in doing so, their voices have not only been silenced by age old patriarchal systems, but they have also been subjected to online violence that stifles their constitutionally protected right to freedom of…

In March 2023, the Ugandan Parliament passed a bill criminalising LGBTQIA+ identities in the country. Human rights organisations around the world condemn the move, calling it a violation of multiple fundamental human rights.

Sex workers in South Africa moved to the internet to seek clients as the offline opportunities dwindled due to the pandemic-induced lockdown. But they face previously unknown challenges with the prevalent online gender based violence in the country; Colleta Dewa discusses.

Where the LGBTQIA+ communities face discrimination across the spectrum, transgender, non-binary and gender diverse folks are discriminated against within the LGBTQIA+ spaces. Researchers Nyx McLean and Thurlo Cicero interrogate how TNBGD people experience this violence in four African countries.

What is belonging? What is its role in our lives - if any? Are we free to belong, freed by belonging or bound by it? In this piece, Etenat pulls the curtains allowing us a little peek into her exploration of these questions through her experience of a war ravaging all she knew -or thought she knew - of land, love and liberation. Her articulation of the sentences exacted upon her (and many…