ADVANCING SAFE,
INCLUSIVE AND
ACCUNTABLE
DIGITAL TECH
FUTURES.

OVERVIEW

Technology has transformed how we connect, organise, learn, and participate in public life. For LGBTQI+ communities across Africa, digital spaces have opened critical pathways for visibility, solidarity, resource mobilisation, and cross-border movement-building — particularly in contexts where physical civic space is restricted.

Yet the same technologies that create possibility also reproduce and intensify inequality.

Digital platforms amplify harassment, outing, doxxing, and hate speech targeting people based on sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC). Governments deploy digital surveillance, spyware, and biometric systems that disproportionately endanger queer and feminist organisers. Restrictive cybercrime and "morality" laws are weaponised to police online expression. Content moderation regimes frequently silence LGBTQI+ voices under vague standards, while failing to adequately address coordinated anti-rights attacks.

At a structural level, governance and design of digital technologies are implicated in nearly all drivers of inequality affecting LGBTQI+ communities. Tech corporations — largely headquartered in the Global North — continue to design and regulate digital systems with limited accountability to African users. Data extraction, opaque algorithms, and AI systems trained on biased datasets reproduce racialised, gendered, and heteronormative hierarchies at scale. Emerging technologies risk automating discrimination in employment, finance, security, and access to services.

Too often, those most impacted by digital harms have the least influence over how technology is governed.

CHEVS' Tech Justice portfolio responds to this imbalance. We work to ensure equal access to, and fair governance of, digital technologies in ways that advance privacy, free expression, safety, and democratic participation for LGBTQI+ people. As technological change continues to outpace public oversight and democratic accountability, we centre the protection of civil and human rights in digital spaces.