From the outside, it’s easy to see TechHerNG as an organisation making technology inclusive and harmless for women. But when we went deeper and had a conversation with Chioma Agwuegbo, the Executive Director at TechHerNG, we realised that this is more than a movement, it is a conviction.
A conviction born from a young woman who understood early that technology could be more than screens and devices, it could be a force for voice, safety, dignity, and change.
In 2015, she launched TechHerNG with a simple mission: bring women together, teach them to use technology confidently, and protect them in digital spaces. What started as a small learning circle has grown into a movement tackling digital literacy, tech-enabled gender-based violence, advocacy, and community-building across Africa.
This is Chioma Agwuegbo, the tech visionary is reminding the world that safety is innovation, that women belong everywhere decisions are made, and that when you bring women together, there is no limit to what can be built.
Read the full interview below.
You’ve built a career at the intersection of women, tech, and activism, three spaces that aren’t always easy to merge. What inspired your decision to build something of your own with TechHerNG?
My background is in communication. I hold a first degree in mass communication, a master’s degree in social media from a time when it was not popular, and I am currently pursuing a PhD in development communication.
I learned early on that technology can be a force for good. It can serve as a tool for change, a unifying force, and a mobilisation tool. That realisation shaped everything that followed, including resigning from my really incredible job at BBC World Service Trust, studying social media for the master’s degree, and everything I have done since then.
My career now revolves around women, technology, advocacy, safety, and communication, which connects all of them. Building TechHer, however, came from a very personal place. I wanted to see more women involved in tech spaces. I wanted to see more women creating technology, not just consuming it. I wanted more women to take ownership of the products we use. I also wanted greater accountability for women’s presence online, whether in how we use products, how products influence us, or how harm is inflicted on women and girls in digital spaces.
And TechHer, as we are currently constituted, is meeting that need on several fronts. There is still room to grow, but we are moving in the right direction, and we can only get better.
Through TechHerNG, you’ve built a space where women learn, build, and lead through tech. When you started, what gap were you trying to close and how close are we today?
TechHer’s first event was held on the 28th of August 2015. I wanted to bring women together to understand what they were using technology for. Whether they were UX or UI testers, web or mobile developers, or women who could only read blogs, I wanted everyone in the room. At that event, we asked participants what they wanted to learn. Someone raised her hand and said she wanted to learn how to use Mailchimp, the newsletter platform. Someone working with me at the time, who had only learned Mailchimp two weeks before, immediately volunteered to teach her. And it occurred to us that if we created spaces where women felt safe to ask questions and be themselves, we could achieve incredible things.
For TechHer, our mission has always been to create spaces where women and girls can access, understand and use technology safely and meaningfully. Sometimes that looks like digital literacy classes across peri-urban secondary and tertiary institutions in Nigeria. Sometimes it looks like advocacy for digital rights or digital safety, whether through the State of Emergency GBV Movement, the GBV Emergency Response Fund or our full portfolio of work on tech-facilitated gender-based violence. It is also about community, which is the third strand of our work. That community work always goes back to that first event in 2015: bringing women together. Whether it is sip-and-paint events, self-defence classes, or the Rooted and Woven retreat, if you allow us to bring women together, we will take it. We believe coming together is powerful.
These were the gaps we were trying to close: digital literacy, tech for governance, and community. How close are we today? Unfortunately, as we continue to work, the harms that keep women away from the internet and digital tools continue to expand. When we started, generative AI abuse was not widespread. Now it is. We did not have the volume of violent simulations we see today. Now they are everywhere.
However, we have also seen women’s voices grow even stronger as they use the internet, which is a real win. It is something organisations like TechHer have helped achieve by empowering women to own their spaces and their voices online.
So, how close are we today? We have a more enlightened population, but there is still so much work to be done.
TechHerNG was born from your desire to make technology accessible for women but we also know tech isn’t always safe for them. What are some of the ways you’ve seen technology being used to harm or silence women?
Technology, I like to say, is like a knife. You can use it to peel an orange, or you can use it to stab a person. For every platform or app designed to move people forward or solve problems, there are others, like UndressAI, built solely to perpetrate violence against women. People are using different apps to simulate women having sex with animals, simply to shame them or shut them down. People are forging WhatsApp chats. Gender disinformation is on the rise, and it is awful.
Gender disinformation is the manipulation or outright manufacturing of information to discredit someone, especially women. Women who are seen as forward, opinionated, feminist, or vocal about women’s rights are often targets. These acts of violence silence women because many of them retreat from public life. Technology becomes a weapon used to shut down women’s voices. And when that happens, half the population is denied the opportunity to engage, denied the platform to participate, denied the space to contribute to public discourse.
It is not enough for technology to be accessible. It has to be safe for women to use. There is no point in inviting women and girls into the big, beautiful world of the internet if they are not secure when they get there.
We have seen cases like a teacher sending pictures of his privates to a secondary school student, telling her he wants her to “see in real life” what she learned in biology class. Or a woman having generative AI used to remove her hijab, putting her at risk of real violence. Or someone having their face placed on the nude body of a pornographic image, then having that image animated to simulate sex with animals. These are real, not fictional scenarios.
These are some of the ways technology is wielded as a weapon to harm and silence women. And this is why safety must be a core part of how we build.
From image-based abuse to doxxing and trolling, tech-enabled GBV often hides in plain sight. What do you wish policymakers, platforms, or even the average user understood about the real-life consequences of online violence?
I wish users of digital platforms understood that, at the other end of their so-called funny jokes, ‘agenda’, ‘ratio’, ‘vawulence’ and bants, there are real people who suffer real pain. People who experience psychological and sometimes even physical effects from abuse, violation and harm. I wish more people recognised that their words and actions online have consequences.
I wish that platforms incorporated safety by design, and not in response to violence that has occurred. There is no reason why AI tools on social media platforms are undressing women or telling children how to commit suicide. It is abhorrent. Those functionalities should not exist. Tech is not neutral, but it is reachable. These companies, as a matter of necessity, must invest more of their vast resources in content moderation and trust and safety teams based on the continent, so that responses can be nuanced, contextual, and grounded in our realities. Prevention and response to tech-facilitated gender-based violence must meet Africa where it is, not import Western standards that do not fit our homegrown challenges.
Finally, I hope policymakers rise up on behalf of the people. I hope they think deeply about policies and legislation that protect the most vulnerable as they use the internet and engage with digital tools. Women, girls, persons with disabilities and queer persons deserve protection. My hope that in creating legislation, policymakers do not go down the path of unethical surveillance, the invasion of people’s privacy or associated harms, but instead create citizen-led and survivor-centred rules and regulations that keep people safe as they navigate the internet and digital spaces in Nigeria.
In your work with young women and first-time politicians, how have you seen online violence affect women’s willingness to speak, lead, or even exist publicly?
Online violence impacts women’s ability to participate in public spaces. We often say we want women to be outspoken, to share their opinions, to voice their concerns. But when women go online and encounter abuse, many of them withdraw. I often cite an example of a woman who posted about permissions in her relationship and how she and her partner had accountability mechanisms that meant they did not have to ask each other for permission to go out. She is a Muslim woman, and some men started claiming she was misguiding other women. They threatened to find her and beat her to “correct” her. Before long, people were offering hundreds of thousands of naira for her address. She stepped away from social media for a while.
It is that leaving, that denial of safe spaces for opinion, thought and expression, that we stand against at TechHer. We invite others to be active bystanders, to stand up to bullies, to challenge people who do not want women to have opinions.
Gender disinformation is another driver. It undermines a woman’s credibility with outright lies and distortions, and it pushes many women out of online spaces. We saw it with Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, with the awful misinformation campaigns about her children and relationship to shame her and distract from her allegation of sexual harassment against the Senate President.
There’s a dangerous myth that online abuse is “just comments.” How do you go about changing that mindset, helping people see it as violence, not banter?
One of the biggest things we emphasise in our work is that online violence has offline consequences. It is not just bants, it is not just content or skits. There are real people on the other side of the pylons, the dog whistling and the abuse, and those people suffer real consequences, sometimes for years. People often think that because the violence happens online, it does not have any real effect, but it does.
Another thing we see is the belief that online platforms give people the anonymity to harm. The truth is, you can be found and punished. A lot of the antisocial behaviour we see online is already covered by various pieces of legislation in Nigeria. So people need to understand that online violence is not an alternate reality. There are real consequences for victims, and there can be real consequences for perpetrators too.
Many of your initiatives like Enough is Enough and State of Emergency GBV have shaped national conversations. What does long-term impact look like for you beyond the hashtags?
Long-term impact, for me, is the voice that one movement gives to the next. Every movement creates space, generates energy and calcifies lessons for the one that follows. Enough is Enough happened so that Not Too Young to Run could happen, so that Bring Back Our Girls could happen, so that Save Bagega could happen, so that the State of Emergency GBV Movement could happen. Each movement strengthens the next. It gives new advocates the confidence to begin and the resilience to carry on. It offers lessons that organisers take forward, helping them advocate in newer and better ways.
The rejection of misogynistic content we see online today wasn’t the state of play 10 years ago. The voices discussing bodily autonomy, insisting on consent and improved outcomes for women and girls, get strengthened by the day, and the progressive expansion and deepening of that is the goal.
Every movement also teaches us what is possible. Sometimes the impact comes from lessons learned. Sometimes it comes from the fact that we did not achieve all our goals, and so we negotiate with the power holders. Sometimes it comes from the coalitions built along the way. All of that is impact.
TechHerNG has worked on GBV advocacy for years now. When you think about impact, what small wins or stories remind you that change is possible?
When I think about the stories of impact from our work, my heart smiles. I think about our Emergency Response Fund, which I started in 2021 to provide urgent financial support for survivors of GBV. Last year, we gave an organisation 12,000 naira and used that money to gather evidence that led to the sentencing of two men who had sodomised a seven-year-old boy. They each received 24 years in prison, from just 12,000 naira.
On KURAM, our data aggregation and incident response site for incidents of tech-facilitated gender-based violence, the stories are endless. The impact is limitless. One case that stands out is a young woman whose nudes were being sold by a group of perpetrators. These criminals were recruiting equally degenerate men on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Telegram, and getting them to pay to join a WhatsApp group where they would be drip-fed these videos of the lady’s nudes. Because we are trusted partners with Meta, we got the content taken down across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. We also got it removed from Twitter. And more importantly, we got the perpetrators arrested. That content is gone, and that young lady was able to graduate from school.
There is so much that has happened across our digital literacy programs and our advocacy work. We developed Nigeria’s first prosecutorial manual for TFGBV. We compiled a reference of laws in Nigeria that, through the Interpretation Act, can be used to prosecute tech-facilitated gender-based violence. We set up Nigeria’s first OGBV law clinic at Nile University. We are seeing law students write their final thesis on TFGBV because of the groundwork we have done.
Last year, we refused to host another panel on International Women’s Day because what haven’t we said about inequality? We hosted a free, sip and paint, cocktail, have a bite and make a friend type of event for 40 women in Abuja. And it was a powerful circle of solidarity and sisterhood. We hosted a rooted and woven retreat for feminists from Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria recently, and in December, we’re hosting female leaders of civil society organisations. Any opportunity to bring women together? We will take it.
Our work is hard, but it gives us a lot of joy. It tells us that change is possible. It also tells us that the more you continue to do the work, the more impact you will see.
You’ve spoken on global stages, from The Hague to The House of Lords. When you look back, what keeps you committed to showing up and how do you hope your journey inspires more African women to take up space in advocacy and tech?
What keeps me committed to showing up? First of all, God. I am a Christian. I believe in God and in God’s help, and I know that many of the things we do are impossible without that help. I would also say my family. My husband and my daughter keep me in this role. My desire to create a safer, more productive and meaningful digital world for my little girl to grow up in is a huge part of my motivation. My parents too, especially my mother, who reminds me every day that it is never too late to grow, to learn or to start again.
And of course, the team at TechHer, recent past and present. They are absolutely fantastic. Some of the finest individuals anyone will ever meet or work with. Their commitment to the work we do and their willingness to show up every day is truly inspiring. They keep me going.
What is my hope for how my journey inspires more African women to take up space in advocacy and tech? I would say this: keep asking questions. Do not stop seeking knowledge. TechHer was born primarily out of my curiosity to find women who were developers, product designers, UI or UX researchers or testers. I started asking questions, and those questions led to our first event on the 28th of August, 2015. Knowledge opens doors. Curiosity builds paths. There is nothing we cannot achieve once we have the knowledge and tools we need.
And finally, never stop speaking. The more we hold our leaders to account, ask questions, and demand good governance, the more likely it is that things will change for the better.
This year’s theme, “UNiTE to End Digital Violence against All Women and Girls,” feels especially powerful for someone who’s been amplifying women’s safety in digital spaces. When you think about “unity,” what does it look like in practice and how do we start building a digital world that truly protects women?
When I think about unity, especially as it concerns ending digital violence against all women and girls, I think about collaboration. Collaboration across legislation, so governments and the legislature, working with citizens and civil society, to develop survivor-centred laws that protect users from harm and exploitation. Collaboration across institutions, so civil society stays vigilant and prospecting, so we are on top of harms to flag and hold people to account. And collaboration across big tech, so social media platforms, digital producers and web developers, because safety begins from design. It should not be an afterthought. It should not be something we try to squeeze in after a product is already built. Grok should never have been able to undress women.
How do we start to build a digital world that truly protects women? We have to decide that safety, not speed or engagement, is paramount before we start building anything. We need legislation that governs how products are developed, how tools are expanded or explored, how our data is collected, stored, used and disposed of. All of these things need to be thought through and developed, incorporated into plans, before we start to create and produce.
We also need swift and commensurate punishment for perpetrators of digital violence, and to be honest, all forms of violence, so that women and girls can be safe as they access, use and understand the internet.
