United Nations, New York — Technology has transformed people's ability to meet their sexual and reproductive health needs and claim their rights, serving as a gateway to information, revolutionizing health-care delivery and enabling societies to better measure progress on multiple issues.
But this progress also has a darker side, unleashing unprecedented dangers particularly through acts of gender-based digital violence, such as doxxing, cyberstalking and deepfakes - various forms of which nearly all women and girls report being subjected to.
UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, has launched initiatives in dozens of countries aimed at harnessing tech's potential to empower women and girls while safeguarding their health, well-being, rights, and lives. Below, we explore three groundbreaking ways they are doing just that.
Finding support after violence in Cameroon
In Cameroon, as is the case globally, women and girls are forced all too often to confront gender-based violence. According to the 2018 Demographic Health Survey, more than four in ten Cameroonian women aged 15 to 49 reported experiencing physical or sexual violence in their lifetime; and one third of women in a relationship said they had been abused by their partner in the previous year.
Yet more than half of survivors of physical or sexual violence did not seek help to stop it, or tell anyone that it had happened. For women and girls around the world, stigma and a lack of access to safety and justice in the aftermath of violations - as well as the normalization of violence - can prevent cases from being reported and addressed.
To provide survivors with solidarity, information and services, the women-led entrepreneurship incubator WETECH launched the mobile application and online platform AlertGBV in 2023. "On the platform, you can find the contacts of partners, therapists and legal practitioners who can help you in your healing and care process," WETECH founder Elodie Nonga-Kenla told UNFPA. "AlertGBV offers the assistance survivors need and even empowers them economically through its Capitalizer Programme."
Ms. Nonga-Kenla said that so far nearly 2,000 people have requested information from the app's chatbot, which is available to offer support and counsel in response to queries 24 hours a day. Hundreds have also been referred to specialized services and informed about gender-based violence. "The information I received through Alert GBV has not only empowered me personally, but it also gave me a lot of knowledge on how to handle other people's situations," one user shared anonymously. "As a Discipline Mistress in my school, I handle a lot of such cases with students."
Claiming the right to bodily autonomy in Kenya
One day in 2018, Queentah Wambulwa woke up to a flood of phone notifications. Someone had posted intimate photos and videos of her to the Facebook group for her home village in Bungoma County, Kenya - photos she had shared privately with her ex-boyfriend years before.
"I felt deeply ashamed and devastated," Ms. Wambulwa told UNFPA in 2023. "Men on the street told me they enjoyed looking at my naked body in the photos and videos."
The non-consensual sharing of intimate images, often colloquially referred to as "revenge porn", happens all too frequently in the digital era. And in Kenya, it is alarmingly common: One survey found that a quarter of the female students in Nairobi who reported facing technology-facilitated gender-based violence dealt with this form of abuse.
The consequences can be shattering. Ms. Wambulwa recalled feeling guilty, anxious and unsafe after her privacy and rights were violated. Reporting the incident to law enforcement proved unhelpful, and she eventually deleted her social media accounts to avoid being cyberbullied further.
UNFPA works to end all forms of gender-based violence and launched the bodyright campaign in 2021 - which Ms. Wambulwa champions - to urge policymakers, technology companies and social media platforms to take image-based abuse and online misogyny as seriously as they take copyright infringement.
Meanwhile, Ms. Wambulwa wants to make sure women and girls in Kenya don't endure what she went through. Now a certified therapist, she launched the leadership and mentoring Girls for Girls Africa Mental Health Foundation, which is supported by UNFPA, and lobbies to change legislation on online violence. "I want to help other survivors of online and physical gender-based violence get justice and healing."
Navigating changes in Turkmenistan
Adolescence is a time of lives taking shape and paths to adulthood forming. That's why empowering young people with tools to navigate changes to their bodies, health and relationships is essential.
In Turkmenistan, however, many young people struggle to access information about condom use, methods of family planning, gender equality and reproductive health. These topics are largely absent from school curricula, with taboos preventing their discussion. Misogynistic norms are also prevalent: Data from 2019 show one in five people in Turkmenistan believed physical violence is justifiable if women left their homes without their husband's permission.
To ensure young people's access to accurate, age-appropriate information in Turkmenistan, UNFPA launched an online platform and mobile application called Yashlyk in 2014, featuring articles, videos, quizzes and advice categorized under "My Body", "My Relationships" and "My Skills". The site also has pages and resources geared specifically towards parents and teachers.
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Over the past two years, Yashlyk has garnered hundreds of thousands of views and visitor traffic has almost doubled since 2022. Fifteen-year-old student Aylar, a Yashlyk user, said she has found the platform helpful. "It answers a lot of questions I have and provides information that we don't always discuss openly in school or at home," she told UNFPA.
New tech and equality for all
Technology has become a powerful tool for placing gender equality and reproductive rights at the heart of sustainable development, a goal set at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo.
To seize these opportunities and tackle the challenges that change can present, UNFPA brought together experts from across governments, academia, think tanks, civil society organizations and the tech and private sectors for the ICPD30 Global Dialogue on Technology - working towards a world in which tech levels the field for women and girls and benefits everyone.
This is part of a series of stories illustrating progress made since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, which committed to ensure gender equality and the right to sexual and reproductive health for all. Find out more.
