The Interactive Initiative for Social Impact and Dataphyte with support from the CSR-HUB has concluded the second series of the 2-day training on “Digital Security Clinic for Civic Actors in West Africa”.
The Digital Security Clinic for Civic Actors in West Africa, held in Lagos on September 20 and 21, 2022, was created to equip members of civil society organizations with the knowledge and skills needed to identify, protect and reduce risks in a highly digital world. The first leg was journalist facing and held in Abuja in July.
The digital clinic had in attendance civil society actors from West Africa, including Ghana, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria, to teach them how to, among other things, understand the digital space and the threats it presents to civic freedoms.
As the world hurtles forward into becoming fully digital, the risks are also rapidly growing especially in climes where fundamental human rights have struggled to find its footing. Rights to privacy, internet access, and freedom of expression are among those rights directly impacted, a development that is cause for concern. These dangers are unlike any others before them, yet they nevertheless have the same effects—the suppression of the press and the reduction of public areas.
This training is designed to help stakeholders understand these threats globally and within their own contexts, to review the nature, framework, and mitigation approaches that are currently in place, as well as to learn practical safety mechanisms and measures. It goes far beyond just focusing on safety and risk mitigation in a digital world.
The goal is that participants’ understanding of the issues will, first, have an impact on their line of work and the creation of solutions for the community of practice, and, second, provide them with useful skills for managing their own safety.
The program director and managing editor of Dataphyte, Adenike Aloba, emphasized the necessity of closing the knowledge gap regarding digital safety and security.
“The gap that exists is a gap of education and so we have to engage, we have to train, we have to teach, but we have to teach with the goal, especially where we have limited resources, of training decision makers in these spaces. These are the people that can engage in their different spaces and in their different places so that the education can spread,” Ms Aloba said.
The training aided Joseph Wamakor of Human Rights Reporters Ghana (HRR-GH) in completely comprehending the idea of digital rights, the rationale behind the necessity for digital safety, as well as the connection between digital rights and the freedoms of expression, the press, and access to information.
“I have learnt how to manage data and how to secure ourselves in the course of our work so that we don’t expose our data, our facts, our information to the power that be. I also learned about actual digital rights. I have been hearing of digital rights all this while and to be honest, I thought it is something we just do online. But I got the enlightenment that is not just something we do online but also involves other contexts of human rights.”
Oloruntosin Taiwo of the Nigerian Rose of Sharon Foundation said that the training served as a wake-up call and taught her how to recognize risks in the digital domain. She added that she now understood better how to contribute to the safety of the public realm by safeguarding her sources as a result of the training she had received.
“I just realised that I might have exposed a lot of whistleblowers that were actually good in the line of my work because we were not really looking out for their protection because we felt that they were community members and that they were doing it for themselves. We just get the information to work with the survival to get justice without really thinking about the protection of the source, now the training will help me do better.”