Ten women from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Senegal have been selected for a digital security training to be held in December in Dakar.

After having trained more than five hundred and fifty (550) journalists and civil society actors in eleven (11) countries in Africa and the Diaspora (Haiti) from 2017 to 2019, AfricTivistes is relaunching its cybersecurity training programme. This time, it is dedicated to women human rights defenders, journalists and media professionals. 

Following a call for applications launched by AfricTivistes in collaboration with Internews under the “Safe Sisters” programme, ten (10) candidates from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Senegal were selected, i.e. five (5) profiles per country out of a total of two hundred and sixty-one (261) applications received between 25 October and 7 November 2022.

This programme, which marks the start of a series of cybersecurity training for women, targets journalists and human rights defenders in the two countries mentioned above. This digital safety training will be held under the Safe Sisters Fellowship Programme.

The training, which is entirely free of charge, will allow participants to exchange experiences in a process of co-learning and co-construction so that they can ensure their own safety and that of their communities online. It will be delivered in three phases:

• – In-person training in Senegal,
• – Online training 
• – Implementation of digital security projects by the fellows.

AfricTivistes will roll out another capacity building programme on digital safety for women journalists and human rights defenders in the coming months, which will be followed by a major advocacy and awareness raising campaign on violence against women and girls online.