Kenya sits at an extraordinary crossroads. It is one of Africa’s most digitally connected nations — a regional hub for mobile innovation, a fertile ground for continental tech entrepreneurship — and simultaneously, a place where the same digital infrastructure that promises economic liberation for women is being weaponised against them with frightening precision. This article examines the landscape of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) in Kenya, drawing on field observations, primary research, and a growing body of evidence from civil society and institutional actors. It interrogates who is vulnerable, what forms of digital violence are most prevalent, and what the legal and programmatic architecture looks like for response. It closes with a set of concrete asks — not just for governments, but for the global technology companies whose platforms shape, and too often ignore, the daily realities of women and girls in the Global South.
INTRODUCTION: THE PHONE IN HER HAND
She is 22. She is a university student in Nairobi. She runs a small business selling clothes through Instagram and WhatsApp. She sends money home through M-Pesa (M-Pesa is a mobile -based money transfer system). She keeps in touch with her friends through TikTok. She reads the news on X. She is, by every measure, digitally active. She is also afraid.
Last month, her ex-partner posted intimate images of her in a WhatsApp group that included people from her church, neighbourhood, and family. She did not know this group existed. She did not know the photos had been taken. She found out the way most women in her situation do: Her phone was inundated with calls and messages from people who had seen the photos.
She is not an isolated case. She is, according to the evidence, one of thousands of women in Kenya navigating violence that hides behind a screen.
This is what technology-facilitated gender-based violence looks like here. It does not begin on the internet. It begins in the lived, embodied relationships that women have always had to manage — the jealous partner, the harassing boss, the controlling family member — and it finds in digital technology a new reach, greater speed, and a more sinister kind of cruelty. The phone in her hand is not neutral. It is a tool with the fingerprints of those who built it, those who profit from it, and those who, far too often, have no intention of being held accountable for what their platforms enable.
TECHNOLOGY IN KENYA: A REVOLUTION WITH UNEVEN RETURNS
Kenya has earned its reputation as a digital powerhouse. With mobile SIM penetration exceeding 100% and internet usage expanding year on year, Kenya is regularly cited as a success story of leapfrog development — a nation that built M-Pesa before most of the world understood what mobile money was, and that hosts Silicon Savannah, the continent’s most celebrated technology innovation corridor. The dominant platforms in everyday Kenyan life are WhatsApp, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and X. For business, Instagram and Jiji dominate informal commerce. Mobile phones are no longer a communication device: they are passports to a socioeconomic identity.
But this revolution in connectivity has not delivered equal returns. Women are less likely than men to own a smartphone, to have consistent internet access, and to participate in digital economic spaces safely. According to the GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report 2024, only 35% of women in Kenya use mobile internet compared to 50% of men. Women in rural areas, women with disabilities, and women with lower levels of formal education face compounding barriers that rarely make it into the success story narrative. These same structural barriers — economic dependence, restricted mobility, limited digital literacy, and the everyday surveillance of women’s lives by partners and family members — are also the conditions that magnify exposure to harm once women come online. Limited access does not insulate women from TFGBV. It compounds it. The offline architecture of gender inequality follows women into digital space, and the platforms amplify it there.
The same mobile phone that allowed a woman in Kisumu to join a savings group through a WhatsApp circle is the same phone through which her abusive partner tracks her location. Access and violence are not opposites in this story. They coexist.
Even where women do have access, that access carries risk. The same Facebook account through which a woman politician campaigns for office is the site where coordinated mobs post sexualised insults designed to silence her. The same TikTok through which a young woman builds a following is the platform where her images can be distorted, stolen, and weaponised within hours. The companies that build and own these platforms have, with stunning consistency, failed to reckon with what that violence costs.
WHAT DOES TFGBV LOOK LIKE IN KENYA?
TFGBV is not a single act. In Kenya, it presents as a constellation of interconnected harms.
Non-Consensual Intimate Image Sharing (NCII)
Known colloquially as “revenge porn,” NCII is one of the most prevalent and most devastating forms of TFGBV documented in Kenya. Images — often taken within intimate relationships, sometimes without the woman’s knowledge — are shared across WhatsApp groups and Telegram channels with the explicit aim of destroying her reputation and social standing. Women who experience NCII report job losses, family estrangement, forced relocation, and in documented cases, suicidal ideation and attempts (see UNFPA, Measuring Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence, 2023; UNFPA Kenya Rapid Study on TFGBV, 2024). The harm is not only emotional — it lands on the body, on the income, on the family.
Cyberstalking and Location-Based Monitoring
The proliferation of low-cost smartphones with built-in location services, combined with informal phone access within households, has created conditions in which digital surveillance of intimate partners is widespread. WhatsApp’s “last seen” feature, social media location check-ins, and GPS tools originally designed for convenience are routinely deployed as instruments of coercive control. Documentation by civil society organisations including COVAW, FIDA Kenya, and AMWIK across Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu consistently confirms that digital monitoring frequently precedes — and escalates alongside — physical intimate partner violence. The phone becomes the leash.
Coordinated Online Harassment
Kenyan women in public life — politicians, journalists, activists, academics — face a particular and particularly vicious form of TFGBV: coordinated mass harassment designed not merely to offend but to silence. The anatomy of these attacks is consistent and clinical: A woman says something publicly; within hours, waves of sexualised abuse, threats of rape and murder, doxxing, and image-based harassment are deployed across multiple platforms simultaneously. Women leave platforms. Women self-censor. Women exit public life. This is not a side effect. It is the goal. And it is working.
A study by the National Democratic Institute (NDI) focused on Kenya’s 2022 general elections found that 56% of female candidates whose accounts were monitored experienced TFGBV on Facebook alone. A 2024 report by AMWIK revealed that over 60% of women in the public sphere — including journalists and political figures — had experienced online harassment in forms ranging from cyberstalking to the unauthorised distribution of intimate content.
Financial and Economic TFGBV
Kenya’s expanding digital economy — mobile commerce, content creation, the Business Process Outsourcing sector — has opened new avenues of economic participation for women. It has simultaneously opened new avenues of exploitation. Online scams targeting women through false employment offers, digital loan blackmail, account hacking for financial gain, and harassment of women in the gig economy by clients who leverage platform rating systems to coerce or punish are growing phenomena. For women whose livelihoods are digital, TFGBV is not just a safety crisis. It is an economic crisis.
WHO IS MOST VULNERABLE? AN INTERSECTIONAL PICTURE
TFGBV does not target everyone in the same way. In Kenya, specific groups of women and girls face layered vulnerabilities that demand targeted recognition.
Young women and adolescent girls — in a country where over 75% of the population is under 35 — are the most digitally active demographic, and the most exposed. A 2024 UNFPA-supported rapid study conducted across Nairobi’s tertiary institutions found that nearly 90% of young adults had witnessed TFGBV, with 39% having experienced it personally. Among female students, the figure rises to 64.4%. The majority did not report incidents formally, citing mistrust of law enforcement and a lack of awareness of reporting mechanisms.
LGBTQ+ women and girls face a form of TFGBV that is simultaneously about gender, sexuality, and legal vulnerability. In a context where same-sex relationships remain criminalised under Kenyan law, outing — the non-consensual digital disclosure of sexual orientation or gender identity — can trigger family violence, loss of housing and employment, and engagement with a criminal justice system that does not protect them.
Women in rural and peri-urban Kenya are no less exposed to TFGBV — family WhatsApp groups, mobile money fraud, and location tracking do not require 5G infrastructure — but they are far less likely to know their rights, to have access to a service provider, or to live within reach of a response programme. The concentration of TFGBV support systems in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu means that the majority of Kenya’s geography is effectively a response vacuum.
WHAT IS WORKING: GROUNDS FOR CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM
It would be inaccurate to speak only of the problem. Kenya has built a TFGBV response architecture that is, by any regional comparison, substantive — even if it is not yet sufficient.
The Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018 (CMCA) includes provisions on cyber harassment and cyberstalking. The Data Protection Act, 2019 creates a privacy framework with direct implications for surveillance-based TFGBV. The Protection Against Domestic Violence Act, 2015 provides pathways for addressing technology-facilitated intimate partner abuse. Kenya has frameworks. What Kenya needs is their sustained, consistent implementation.
Kenya’s civil society ecosystem for TFGBV response is, by any regional standard, advanced and deeply committed. FIDA Kenya, COVAW, AMWIK, and IAWRT Kenya have developed frontline capacity, conducted primary research, provided legal aid, and driven advocacy with a sophistication that consistently exceeds the institutional response they are trying to hold accountable. They did not wait for governments or technology companies to show up. They showed up themselves — with limited funding, enormous expertise, and relentless determination. They are the backbone of whatever protection currently exists for women and girls in Kenya’s digital spaces.
At the programmatic level, the UNFPA Making All Spaces Safe (MASS) Programme (2024-2027) and the UN Women DigiKen initiative are delivering Kenya-specific interventions — integrating TFGBV prevention into digital literacy programming and working with state institutions and technology actors to build more accountable response systems.
ASKS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN NOW
The question is not whether TFGBV in Kenya is a crisis. It is. The only question that matters at this stage is who has the will and the power to treat it as one.
To Technology Companies
The platforms on which this violence is happening have the tools, the data, and the resources to intervene far more effectively than they currently do. Content moderation must function in Swahili, Kikuyu, Luo, Kamba, and the other languages in which Kenyan women are targeted. Swahili-language harassment is vastly under-moderated compared to English-language content — not because of technical limitation, but because of a structural choice about which users these companies have decided are worth protecting. Genuinely accessible local reporting mechanisms connected to Kenyan legal and support institutions are needed now. A global content policy written in California is not a local safety infrastructure.
To the Kenyan Government
Explicit criminalisation of non-consensual intimate image sharing within the CMCA framework is overdue. Investment in police capacity for digital evidence handling, prosecutor competence in cybercrime, and judicial understanding of digital cases cannot wait. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner needs full resourcing to investigate privacy complaints relevant to TFGBV. Extension of mandatory referral pathways to formally include TFGBV as a recognised category of harm requiring coordinated response across police, health, and social services is necessary now.
To International Partners and Donors
Kenya’s civil society response ecosystem is chronically under-resourced. Sustained, multi-year, flexible funding that reflects the cross-sectoral nature of TFGBV is needed now. TFGBV does not end at the boundary of any single donor’s thematic priority area. It intersects with economic justice, political participation, health, and democratic security. Funding frameworks need to reflect that complexity — and to fund accordingly.
To the Global TFGBV Community
The women who are building Kenya’s response to TFGBV — the lawyers, the digital rights advocates, the researchers, the survivors who have turned their experiences into public testimony — must be at the table where global decisions about technology and gender-based violence are made. Not as beneficiaries. Not as case studies. As architects. The women of Kenya are not waiting for someone else to solve this problem. They are solving it. What they need is genuine partnership, genuine resourcing, and genuine power at the table.
CONCLUSION: THE NETWORK CAN BE SOMETHING ELSE
The 22-year-old in Nairobi is in the same position. She is still using WhatsApp and TikTok and Instagram. She did not leave the internet. She could not afford to — her business, her income, her social world live there. What she did was adjust: She became more reticent, guarded in who she trusts, more fearful of the consequences of visibility, slightly smaller than she was before.
This smallness, this shrinking of oneself in a digital public space, is the cost of TFGBV. Not just to her, but to all of us — to the public discourse that loses her voice, to the market that loses her enterprise, to the democracy that loses her participation, to the internet itself, which becomes less human and less honest every time a woman leaves it or makes herself smaller within it.
The network does not have to be a weapon. That original promise — of connection, of amplification, of voice — is still worth fighting for. In Kenya, where millions of women have everything to gain from a genuinely safe digital world, it is not just worth fighting for. It is being fought for, every single day.
That world is going to be built by women like the ones this article is about: the lawyers pushing case by case for better law, the civil society actors running training sessions with borrowed bandwidth, the researchers documenting harm in systems that too often refuse to see it, the survivors who turned their worst moments into testimony that moves policy.
It is being built here, on this frontier. The rest of the world would do well to pay attention.
This article was written by Annah Katuki, member of COFEM’s TFGBV Working Group.
Key Terms and Acronyms
TFGBV Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence
NCII Non-Consensual Intimate Images (“revenge porn”)
CMCA Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018 (Kenya)
NGEC National Gender and Equality Commission (Kenya)
FIDA Kenya Federation of Women Lawyers in Kenya
COVAW Coalition on Violence Against Women
AMWIK Association of Media Women in Kenya
IAWRT Kenya International Association of Women in Radio and Television, Kenya Chapter
COFEM Coalition of Feminists for Social Change
GBV Gender-Based Violence
BPO Business Process Outsourcing
NDI National Democratic Institute
MASS Making All Spaces Safe (UNFPA programme)
ODPC Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (Kenya)
References
LEGISLATIVE AND POLICY FRAMEWORKS
- Republic of Kenya. (2018). Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, No. 5 of 2018. Kenya Law.
- Republic of Kenya. (2019). Data Protection Act, 2019. Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.
- Republic of Kenya. (2015). Protection Against Domestic Violence Act, No. 2 of 2015. Kenya Law.
CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANISATIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL REPORTS
- Association of Media Women in Kenya (AMWIK). (2024). Report on Online Harassment of Women in the Public Sphere in Kenya. AMWIK, Nairobi.
- Coalition on Violence Against Women (COVAW). TFGBV documentation, response services and legal aid — Kenya. covaw.or.ke
- Federation of Women Lawyers in Kenya (FIDA Kenya). Digital rights, legal aid and advocacy on technology-facilitated violence. fidakenya.org
- International Association of Women in Radio and Television, Kenya Chapter (IAWRT Kenya). Digital safety and gender-based violence in media — Kenya. iawrt.org
- National Gender and Equality Commission (NGEC). (2025). Statement on the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence 2025. NGEC, Nairobi.
- National Democratic Institute (NDI). (2023). TFGBV and Women Political Candidates in Kenya’s 2022 General Elections. NDI, Washington DC.
UN AND INTERNATIONAL AGENCY PUBLICATIONS
- Collaborative Centre for Gender and Development (CCGD); University of Nairobi Women’s Economic Empowerment Hub; UNFPA Kenya. (2024). Rapid Study on Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence in Kenya’s Higher Learning Institutions. UNFPA Kenya, Nairobi.
- UNFPA Kenya. (2024-2027). Making All Spaces Safe (MASS) Programme: Addressing Technology-Facilitated Gender Violence in Kenya. UNFPA Kenya.
- UNFPA Kenya. (2025). First Inaugural Symposium on Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence: Proceedings. UNFPA Kenya, Nairobi.
- UNFPA. (2023). Measuring Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence: A Discussion Paper. UNFPA, New York.
- UN Women Kenya. (2025). DigiKen (Digital Platforms Kenya) Programme Factsheet. UN Women, Nairobi.
CIPESA — DIGITAL RIGHTS AND INTERNET FREEDOM IN AFRICA
- Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA). (2024). State of Internet Freedom in Africa Report 2024. CIPESA, Kampala.
- CIPESA. (2025). Tackling the Crisis of Digital Violence Against Women in Africa: Which Way for ACHPR Resolution 522?. CIPESA, Kampala.
- CIPESA. (2024). Governments Urged to Adopt Specific Policies Addressing Tech-Facilitated Violence Against Women in Politics. CIPESA, Kampala.
FURTHER READING
- African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR). (2022). Resolution on the Protection of Women Against Digital Violence in Africa, ACHPR/Res. 522 (LXXII) 2022. African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
- GSMA. (2024). Mobile Gender Gap Report 2024. GSMA, London.
- UNFPA. (2024). Global Call to Action to Address Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence. UNFPA, New York.
