April 30 2025, Africa Meetup

From TCU Wiki

The Africa Regional Meetups are bimonthly video calling gatherings that bring together folks from the African region to share, connect, seek help, and release stress by celebrating each other. In addition, it is a time for us to find ways to support each other, and help us understand what is happening in our part of the world. If you cannot attend the monthly meetups, we are taking notes of each gathering and linking to them below.

The African community is connected during the week in different ways. Either through the African channel on the TCU Mattermost or via different events organized on various topics during the year.

Date: Wednesday, April 30

Time: 10am EDT / 2pm UTC (What time is it in my city?)

Who: Facilitated by Mardiya

Where: Google Meet

Notes: Please put notes here: https://pad.riseup.net/p/africa-meetup

Digital Rights Organizational Analysis: Lessons from Gambia

In this Digital Rights Africa Meetup combined with TCU's Community Knowledge Share webinar format, Poncelet will be sharing his approach to conducting timely organizational assessments to identify strengths, opportunities and weaknesses within current models. The goal is to share knowledge on how small digital rights organizations can map out emerging trends to make timely decisions contributing to their sustainability in the long run.

Mr. Poncelet Ileleji is a highly experienced ICT and institutional development expert with a comprehensive 25-year tenure in the field. His professional engagement has been centered around leveraging Information and Communication Technology as a pivotal tool for sustainable development. Throughout his career, he has actively participated in various ICT initiatives, research endeavors, and capacity-building programs.

Notes

Africa Meetups

Presentation

Digital Rights Contexts in Gambia
  • The cost of internet and infrastructure is one of the highest in Africa
  • There is only one submarine cable, which causes a lot of outages to the network
  • There is some scrutiny on cyber security law, with the country having to adopt the Malabo Convention. There is no specific technology institute, however the only one that happens to work on tech related policies and work, but it is all encompassing of other institutes.
Sustainability Learnings
  • Collaborating with communities, law enforcement and some form of government entity. It is important that the community owns these initiatives, and it cannot be removed from them.
  • Documentation: successes, shortcoming, and conducting frequent evaluations for the program. As the tech landscape evolves its essential for documentation to happen to refer to the learning and lessons from the past.
  • Community : it's particularly significant to center those who are most affected by digital threats and inequalities.
Challenges faced and Recommended Approaches
  • Infrastructural Gaps, and Rural Divide: Gambia has a significant infrastructural gap, leaving most responses to focus on bridging the rural and urban divide. Some initiatives include, last-mile connectivity, and community networks that try to provide affordable internet access to the community.
  • Policy Implementation Gaps: The organization currently utilizes IGF spaces to advocate for policies that need to be implemented to advance digital rights. Such international stakeholder conversations, bring the org business partners or cso stakeholders etc.
  • Privacy, Cybersecurity, and OGBV:
  • Sustainability: ensuring that initiatives are embedded in National Strategies, and encouraging local ownership. Making sure that each policy or update, the org is part of the process and aware of any progress or regression that happens.
Insights for Digital Rights Organisation
  • Collaborate with the national human rights commission, and participate in national assemblies. One might not be active in politics but its important to join these open sessions and influence the topics, agendas, and strategies in their plans or report
  • Focus on community rather than solely organizational interests: Building a community that has their ability to understand their digital rights and lead initiatives.
  • Capacity building is essential : For CSOs, human rights defenders, setting up fact checking training.  
  • Partner with local IT associations for inclusive training programs. This cannot happen in silo, and collaborations with other experts are important to advance digital right
  • Knowledge sharing, learning and improvements.
  • Plan international events and attendance in advance, for the organization and oneself.  
Questions:
Does Jokkolabs have any resources you have created for folks who want to follow up much later.

After doing SWAT, I have to ask when we start programming. It is important to get feedback for creating the programming perfect for the environment of the people who need us.

As digital trainers, you don't expect the same level of understanding depending on the place where you go to train. When communities don’t understand the basics of tools, it is pointless at the end of the day.

You can make generalized assumptions. I have worked in a lot of countries in Africa. Assuming for example that women don’t use the internet in villages, when we run programmes for them, we see that children show tech to their mothers, so we can’t assume otherwise. And we have to teach the basics too for security for mothers and children. And the important thing is to know your rights, even if you don’t know english, the main language for learning tech and internet.

Participant: media literacy training for different groups, focusing misinformation and disinformation. There is a high engagement in Jamaica, no matter the social groups and income levels, with the internet, even more after the pandemic. Due to the need to keep up with education and production. Sitting with farmers signing up to different social media platforms and deconstructing different media literacy algorithms, I found that among the women especially, they discover how tech works by reflecting on their own experiences. All of them are concerned about who is behind big tech and the consequences of their use. Data Protection Laws are too broad and there is no opportunity to engage with the legal system for rural people. Or immigrants. And they are very engaged with the Internet, they consume a lot. The system is against us. We can’t change it. We try to break down the language (tech, police, government…), so they can talk better about their concerns, so then we can talk about Digital Rights and how they can advocate for them.

Initiatives about digital rights organizations get better content for their communities. How do you think we can defeat our mindset that fails in leadership?

Learning historical events and how they are being replicated, not much is new and it's important to take those lessons. And learn for your peers, listen to other organizations in other regions, you can learn lessons from that, like the Arab Spring and how they organized and used data and tech is also a good example.

Resources from JOKKOLABS on these topics.

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