Digital gender-based violence is a pervasive economic and social barrier, with figures showing that 34% of young people (18-24) in sub-Saharan Africa experience online bullying and 28% of women in the region have experienced online violence.

According to the African Development Bank (AfDB), as Africa advances its digital transformation, ensuring online safety for women and girls is central to achieving inclusive growth and unlocking Africa’s digital future.

The financier during these 16 days of activism has outlined five bold moves needed to make online spaces safer and more empowering.

Enact Comprehensive, Gender-Responsive Cyber Laws

Many African countries currently lack the legislation to clearly define and criminalise digital forms of GBV.

Governments must develop and enforce laws that recognise digital GBV as a crime, ensure survivor-centered protections and facilitate cross-border cooperation to manage transnational digital abuse.

Development partners like the African Development Bank are ready to support these essential legal reforms through technical assistance.

Embed Online Safety into Digital and National Development Strategies

Investments in digital infrastructure often overlook online safety, particularly for women.

Governments must follow examples like Rwanda’s National Cyber Security Policy by mandating ‘safety by design,’ funding public education on digital rights and integrating digital safety into school curricula.

Aligning technology investments with secure, inclusive policies is essential to ensure the digital economy benefits everyone.

Hold Tech Platforms Accountable

Tech platforms must be held to higher standards.

Despite profiting from African users, many offer minimal culturally adaptive content moderation and inadequate protections.

Africa needs a regional framework to set minimum safety standards, enforce content regulation and establish real-time grievance redress systems.

Benchmarks, such as South Africa’s Film and Publication Board Amendment Act, demonstrate how accountability and transparency can be enforced.

Invest in Survivor-Led Innovation and Gender-Sensitive Digital Solutions

African women are key innovators in digital safety.

Targeted funding is required to amplify the efforts of organisations like Pollicy in Uganda and the Center for Information Technology and Development in Nigeria that create digital safety tools, train communities and advocate for online rights.

Investing in these survivor-led initiatives not only protects women but strengthens the entire ecosystem for social change and innovation.

Establish Regional and Continental Cooperation Mechanisms

Based on the need for cross-border cooperation implied in the first point and the call for a regional framework in the third point, this fifth point completes the structural argument.

A formal African Union or regional economic community framework is necessary to harmonise definitions, share best practices for enforcement and streamline processes for reporting and addressing digital abuse that spans multiple jurisdictions.

This cooperation ensures perpetrators cannot exploit legal loopholes across borders, thereby offering robust protection continent-wide.

How to expose systemic gender-based violence

The 16 Days of Activism Against gender-based violence is a pivotal global campaign running annually from November 25 (International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women) to Wednesday (Human Rights Day).

This period is dedicated to raising awareness, calling for urgent action to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls.

During this critical time and throughout the year, journalists play an indispensable role in shifting the public narrative from isolated incidents to a recognition of systemic GBV.

It is not enough to report individual acts of violence; journalists must use their platform to expose the underlying patterns, institutional failures and policy gaps that perpetuate this crisis.

By leveraging data, journalists can provide the evidence needed to hold power accountable and drive meaningful legislative and societal change.

The following steps, based on the investigative work of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ), provide a powerful blueprint for how data journalism can expose the systemic failings that perpetuate gender-based violence (GBV), turning individual tragedies into evidence of institutional collapse.

The CCIJ’s investigation, Without Justice: How Eswatini’s System Is Failing Victims of Gender-Based Violence, began with the tragic story of Zodwa Nkambule’s daughter in Eswatini, whose attacker died without facing charges.

The resulting exposé shifted the focus from individual crimes to the systemic gaps that allow victims to “fall through the cracks.”

The investigation, which analysed over 4 600 high court cases, found a pattern of systemic failure, suggesting the justice system is overwhelmed and inefficient, even following the 2018 adoption of the Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Act (SODV).

Gaps identified in the justice process:

• Victims are pressured to withdraw their accounts or are too afraid to report.

• Cases vanish from court rosters or are dismissed for procedural errors.

• Judges misapply the law, or cases are delayed for years.

Steps to Data Driven GBV Investigation

CCIJ series Editor Carolyn Thompson and Data Editor Sotiris Sideris outline the methodology used to turn a single story into an evidence-based report on systematic failure.

Start with a focused hypothesis

Formulate a clear, testable assumption.
Principle: Use the framing: “Someone is doing something for a reason.”

Gather information: What do you know so far?

Goal: Determine what information is needed to prove the hypothesis and why convictions are failing.

Build an information map

Focus: Select only the sources that can contextually help the report.

Find data sources

Alternatives include scraping, paid access, FOIA requests or expert interviews.

Analyse, sort and extract the data

Tools: Web scraping, APIs, spreadsheets, or OCR tools such as Amazon Textract.