Kenya Pilot
ScrollSafe is launching in Kenya as a pilot because of its relevance and strategic importance. In late 2021, the ScrollSafe team undertook a series of localisation workshops with Kenyan women* activists, journalists, and community organisers to understand their needs and what a solution to OGBV on social media would look like for them. This model of localising online safety functionalities is intended to be exported to other national contexts in the future to ensure solutions are relevant to their contexts and available in local languages.
Why Kenya?
Kenya is one of the fastest growing digital markets on the African continent. Digital technologies and social media are widely used by Kenyan citizens, activists, political leaders and journalists alike. According to the Communications Authority, Internet subscriptions in Kenya stand at 39.6 million (over 80% of the population).
The popular social media and Internet messaging services are WhatsApp, with 12 million users, Facebook with 7.8m, YouTube with 8m, Twitter with 1m, and Instagram with 1m. The emergence of social media and various other digital technologies and services has brought new hope to Kenyan women* with regards to their socio-economic participation.
Yet, a recent study on sexism and violence against women in African parliaments by the Interparliamentary Union (IPU) and the African Parliamentary Union (APU) revealed that at least 42% of women parliamentarians had received death threats, rape threats, or threats of beating or abduction online.
As women* are systematically side-lined for civic and political spaces, many of today’s digital technologies can function as an enabling mechanism to raise and amplify their voices to be heard within their communities, in societal discourses and in general public debates. However, digital technologies also perpetuate and reinforce the inequalities that exist offline and come with their own unique forms of discrimination and violence. Today, gender-based violence has undoubtably manifested itself in the digital space as well and with it, multiple forms of hate speech and online harassment.
The timing is right
Kenya’s general elections are scheduled to take place in August 2022. Lessons from previous electoral periods have told us that the use of digital technologies and social media for campaigning, grassroots organizing, and news dissemination are and will be decisive. While social media has stimulated civic empowerment and engagement, they have also exposed Kenya’s democracy to exacerbated risk factors such as misinformation, disinformation, and hateful content. Novel challenges such as deep fakes and microtargeting pose unique threats to Kenya’s electoral democracy.
These risk factors, combined with a history of election-related violence, make Kenyan elections particularly vulnerable to the weaponization of social media and the internet (Source: Safeguarding-Digital-Elections-in-Kenya-–-Executive-Summary-Report_Final.pdf (kofiannanfoundation.org).
Turning the law into reality
Kenya’s national legislature has already passed a number of laws to curb sexual violence and harassment (National Gender and Equality Commission (NGEC) Act (2010), Sexual Offences Act (2006)) and one that accounts for acts of violence in the cyberspace and criminalizes abuse on social media (Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act (2018).
Yet, in their 2020 policy brief “Creating safe online spaces for women”, Kenyan ICT-policy think tank and ScrollSafe partner KICTANet concludes that existing legislation and reporting mechanisms are still insufficient in providing survivors of OGBV with adequate support. Now is the time to turn legislation into action!