In-Depth

Recording cameras everywhere, facial recognition software, gait-recognition technology, unauthorized collection of pictures: It is widely known now that private companies are working with states on surveillance, but does this affect women and girls in a particular way? “While online security is for everyone, women and girls are frequent targets of malicious attacks online, and they suffer greater consequences from online attacks than men,” affirms Melissa Hope Ditmore in this article written for GenderIT.org.

Three (and many more) online is not a crowd – neither online nor offline. That is what the multi-award-winning blog "Adventures from the bedrooms of African women" posits. In this interview, one of the blog's founders and writers, Nana Darkoa from Ghana, talks about how this space started, what the boundaries are, and what it takes to build a safe and free space where African women can openly discuss a variety of issues related to sex, pleasure and sexuality – in spite of trolls and bad kissers.

In this article, the writer Minna Salami states that while the digital wave is marked by more diversity than previous feminist waves, with people of all walks of life contributing, it is nevertheless predominantly the ways that white/western feminists challenge patriarchal structures using the internet that has garnered attention. "However, important milestones of the global feminist struggle go ignored if we look only at the ways that the white/western feminist movement uses the internet," she adds. The fact is that feminists everywhere are using new technologies to fundamentally change society but the achievements of online feminisms in Africa, for instance, are hardly known within the continent, let alone outside it. Salami challenges this general trend by sharing a few examples on how African feminists are using the internet to change society.