AfricTivistes

AfricTivistes is the Dakar-headquartered pan-African civil-society network founded on 26 November 2015 in Dakar by Senegalese web-activist Cheikh Fall and journalist Aïsha Dabo under the original French name Ligue africaine des blogueurs et web activistes pour la démocratie (African League of Bloggers and Web Activists for Democracy). The organisation grew out of the constellation of citizen-monitoring web platforms that had blossomed across the continent between 2011 and 2015 — Cheikh Fall's Sunu2012 platform monitoring Senegal's 2012 presidential election, and the kindred Benin (#Vote229), Burkina Faso (#Lwili), and Ghana (#GhanaVote) initiatives that followed — and convened those cyber-activist cohorts into a standing pan-African network at the November 2015 Dakar summit. Today it is the corpus's principal Francophone-West-Africa and pan-African anchor on the intersection of digital technology and democratic governance, and the first dedicated African cyber-activist-network entry in the corpus, complementing the Paradigm Initiative's Anglophone-rooted continental digital-rights work and Pollicy's East-African afro-feminist civic-tech work.

Founding and structure

AfricTivistes emerged from the #Sunu2012 platform — Wolof for "Our 2012" — that Cheikh Fall and the Senegalese bloggers' network had launched from June 2011 as a citizen-monitoring initiative for the country's February–March 2012 presidential election, inviting citizens to surface irregularities in the electoral process in real time. The Sunu2012 cycle catalysed analogous initiatives in Benin (#Vote229), Burkina Faso (#Lwili), and Ghana (#GhanaVote), and Cheikh Fall was invited across the continent to share the Senegalese experience. After four years of online exchanges among that loose pan-African cyber-activist cohort, the teams convened in Dakar in November 2015 and on 26 November 2015 launched AfricTivistes as the standing institutional vehicle: a registered civil-society organisation whose mission, as defined at the founding summit, was to monitor whether the rights of African citizens were being respected by their governments and to call out governments when they were not.

The organisation is governed by President Cheikh Fall (since 2015) and Vice-President Cyriac G. Gbogou, with a multi-country focal-point structure that distributes operational leadership across Benin, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and other African nations. The membership has grown from the founding cohort that Cheikh Fall characterised as "200 cyber-activists from 35 different countries on the continent" to the 400-plus members across 45 African countries recorded in the organisation's 2025 ten-year impact figures, alongside a documented track record of supporting ten presidential elections technically and fostering twenty change-agent communities across the continent.

Programme structure

AfricTivistes's 2025–2029 Strategic Plan organises the work around four pillars: Civic Engagement and Pan-African Network, Democracy and Governance, Media and Information Resilience, and Tech4Changes. The thematic register that runs through these pillars — codified in the organisation's self-description as a pan-African organisation promoting democracy, good governance and human rights through digital technology and ICTs — covers good governance; transparency and accountability; participatory democracy; cybersecurity; social development; the fight against corruption; and the culture of peace. The operational delivery happens through five recurring shapes of work: digital-infrastructure development (the CitizenLab platforms in seven countries); election civic-tech support (the €175,000 Election Civic Tech Fund supporting civic-technology initiatives across 14 countries); capacity-building (the AfricTivistes Academy and the 1,350-plus in-person training beneficiaries recorded to 2025); research and advocacy campaigns (the Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference research, the AI-chatbot-reliability study, and the Innov4Democracy hackathon); and community mobilisation through the pan-African summit cycle.

The cybersecurity programme line — substantively a gender-and-tech programme — is anchored on the AfricTivistes Femmes Cybersecurity initiative, which delivers cybersecurity training to women across Senegal and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and runs the parallel #TaxawTemm advocacy campaign on responsible social-media use and the Khadija ChatBot, an interactive digital assistant supporting women navigating online harassment. The programme is delivered in partnership with Internews and explicitly targets the audiences most exposed to cyberbullying — bloggers, activists, journalists, human-rights defenders, and political actors — with women named as the majority of those subject to the harassment the programme exists to counter.

CitizenLab and the pan-African civic-tech network

The AfricTivistes CitizenLab is the organisation's distinctive operational scaffolding for distributing civic-technology capacity across the continent. Framed as a "citizens' factory" — a programme that supports, accompanies, and equips civil-society actors in each country through training, tool development, and innovation co-creation — the CitizenLab network had by 2024 installed the first three labs in Mauritania, Benin, and Madagascar, and then expanded the model to Chad, Cameroon, Guinea, and Senegal, equipping a further forty change-agents in those four countries. Each national CitizenLab operates a country-specific civic-information platform (citizenlabsenegal.org, citizenlabmauritanie.org, citizenlabguinee.org, citizenlabcameroun.org, citizenlabtchad.org) carrying participatory-democracy reporting, election-monitoring tools, and locally-grounded civic-technology projects. The CitizenLab network is the most concrete realisation of the AfricTivistes thesis that digital tools can carry the participatory-democracy agenda across African countries that lack the heavy civil-society infrastructure characteristic of better-resourced continental contexts, and is the operational counterpart to the AfricTivistes Academy MOOC programme on African democracy, elections, and governance that has been running since 2021.

AI, elections, and information integrity

AfricTivistes's AI-and-elections programme line consolidated in 2024–2025 as the leading civil-society register through which the organisation engages with generative-AI risk on the continent. The work runs along three threads: empirical study of AI tool reliability, advocacy and training on AI-mediated disinformation, and pan-African civic-tech investment to counter information manipulation.

On the empirical side, AfricTivistes partnered with Democracy Reporting International on a chatbot-reliability study testing five major chatbots — Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT-4omini, and Claude — on the Senegalese legislative elections of 17 November 2024. The study assessed accuracy, consistency, and completeness across the tools, and concluded that "chatbots cannot be considered entirely reliable sources of electoral information"; none of the chatbots could integrate recent developments in Senegal's political context, and several "provided incorrect information with high levels of confidence, posing a serious risk of disinformation — especially during electoral periods". AfricTivistes's canonical position from the study is that "citizens, journalists and civil-society actors [should] systematically verify the information obtained through these tools" rather than relying on chatbots as primary electoral-information sources.

On the advocacy-and-training side, AfricTivistes co-organised with the Alliance for Migration, Leadership, and Development (AMLD) the 30–31 October 2024 Dakar workshop on Disinformation in Pre-, During, and Post-Electoral Periods, gathering 100 participants — mainly women and young people from political circles, civil society, and the media — for training on "the role of artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence in politics", on the legal frameworks governing electoral information, and on distinguishing the categories of disinformation that circulate during election periods.

On the civic-tech-investment side, AfricTivistes announced in 2025 the €175,000 Innovation Fund for Citizen Participation in Electoral Processes in Africa (Election Civic Tech Fund) supporting civic-technology initiatives across 14 African countries, alongside the June 2025 launch of Farafina, presented as the continent's first one-stop online platform dedicated to elections and electoral processes. The AI-and-elections work sits inside the wider Media and Information Resilience pillar of the 2025–2029 Strategic Plan and is anchored in the longer Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference research line — most visibly the 2 October 2025 Dakar presentation of the FIMI in Senegal research report.

Coalition role and regional convening

AfricTivistes operates as a convener of pan-African civil society on digital democracy and information integrity. The organisation co-organised with TikTok the Regional Summit on Digital Security in Africa in Dakar, is the continental anchor for the #Innov4Democracy Hackathon series cultivating civic-technology builders, and runs the AfricTivistes Summit cycle that has gathered more than 550 participants over the network's first decade. AfricTivistes's published partnership stack reflects the multilateral-and-coalition orientation that distinguishes the network — its English homepage lists the West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI), the African Development Bank, Internews, Article 19, Oxfam, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and TikTok among partners — and the French Wikipedia article records WILDAF, WACSI, Oxfam, Stanford Law School, and Media Defence among the named institutional partners. The organisation is one of the continental civil-society signatories of the #KeepItOn coalition's joint advocacy against internet shutdowns and digital-rights restrictions across Africa, sitting in the same continental civil-society network as the Paradigm Initiative on Anglophone-rooted internet-shutdowns work and Pollicy on East-African feminist civic-tech.

Posture in the movement

AfricTivistes's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good movement is its work as the principal pan-African civil-society anchor at the intersection of digital democracy and information integrity, with a particular density of programmatic infrastructure in Francophone Africa that the corpus's other African anchors do not carry. Its 2024 chatbot-reliability study with Democracy Reporting International is one of the corpus's clearest civil-society empirical contributions to the question of whether generative-AI tools are fit to serve as electoral-information sources, and its conclusion that confident-but-wrong chatbot output during election periods is itself a disinformation risk has shaped the broader continental conversation on AI-mediated electoral interference. Its 2025–2029 Strategic Plan organised around Media and Information Resilience as a standing pillar, its Election Civic Tech Fund investing in fourteen-country civic-technology pipelines, and its CitizenLab network distributing civic-tech capacity across seven African countries together constitute one of the most operationally-developed civil-society scaffolds against AI-mediated electoral disinformation on the continent. In the corpus's terms AfricTivistes is the load-bearing Francophone-West-Africa and pan-African cyber-activist-network anchor — the Dakar-headquartered counterpart to the Paradigm Initiative's Lagos-headquartered continental digital-rights work and to Pollicy's Kampala-headquartered afro-feminist civic-tech work — and closes the corpus's Francophone-West-Africa organisational gap as the first dedicated African cyber-activist network entry.