23/09/2026
Through the 2023 election cycle, women who stood for office in Nigeria were met with sexualised attack content, doctored images and coordinated campaigns designed to make public life costly enough that they would withdraw. Some did. Generative AI has since cut the cost and skill needed to produce that material to almost nothing, so the 2027 cycle will likely bring more of it, faster.
Most of what a response needs already exists here. Digital security audits, evidence preservation done properly, civil-society channels into the platforms, legal aid, SGBV services, psychosocial support. Working on the threat assessment, we found that as of mid-2026 nothing election-focused connects them, which leaves a woman under attack to find each one herself while it is happening.
Our new policy brief, A Nigerian Women in Politics Digital Defence Helpline, proposes joining them up. It would run as a consortium service rather than a new organisation, with one intake route and trained case-handlers. A caller could draw on five things: a security audit before a campaign, rapid response when an incident is live, platform escalation, referral to legal and SGBV support, and opt-in psychosocial referral. Confidentiality governs all of it. Personal information stays with the assigned case-handler, and callers can withdraw consent at any point, including having their case records deleted.
The brief makes three asks.
We want donors to fund this as a discrete piece of work, with bridge funding that keeps the team together after the election instead of dismantling it in March.
We are asking civil-society partners to sign the operating memorandum, set out a referral pathway in writing, and hold real case-handling capacity through the peak period.
And we want the platforms to recognise an accredited reporting channel for gendered-disinformation cases involving Nigerian political figures, with a named contact for the worst material: sexualised imagery, voice-cloned audio, doxxing.
This policy brief was produced by the Brain Builders Youth Development Initiative and FactCheck Africa, supported by the Digital Democracy Initiative and CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation.
