Online violence is driving women out of politics in Kenya, and the patterns that disfigured the last general election are already repeating ahead of the next one, a UN Women study has found.
It is happening in a country where a man convicted of sharing a woman’s intimate images without her consent faces a maximum compensation order of KES 200,000 ($1,500). A man who pirates music can be fined up to KES 5 million, 25 times more. UN Women calls the gap “a statement of values encoded in statute”, one that says “women’s bodily integrity, dignity and psychological well-being are valued well below commercial intellectual property”. The compensation cap comes from the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act 2018, the fine from the Copyright Act.
The Cost of Silence, published last month by UN Women’s Kenya country office under its DigiKen programme, describes itself as the first comprehensive assessment of technology-facilitated gender-based violence in the country. It says its chapter on political participation offers the most detailed picture yet of the effect on Kenyan women in public life, at a moment when the 2027 general election is approaching and the 2022 patterns are, on the testimony of multiple respondents, “already repeating and intensifying”.
How candidates were attacked
Researchers documented coordinated campaigns that combined online character assassination with physical intimidation. Online attacks on women candidates were in some cases followed by organised disruption of their rallies, which the report says suggests digital attack networks were coordinating with operatives on the ground.
AI-generated deepfakes of women candidates were circulated inside their own constituencies, largely through community WhatsApp groups the candidates could not join and had no means of correcting.
Analysis by Pollicy and the National Democratic Institute, cited in the study, found 55.7 per cent of the Facebook accounts of women candidates received online violence during the 2022 election. Eighty per cent of women candidates stayed active online throughout that campaign, against 93 per cent of men.
Eight moderators for a continent
The report attributes to its own interviews a figure it does not source elsewhere: that Meta has eight content moderation staff covering the whole of Africa, which it describes as a continent of 1.4 billion people speaking more than 50 languages. It calls that “not merely a resource allocation problem” but “a governance design problem”.
It also records participants describing platforms rolling back moderation between 2023 and 2025 — content once removed being reinstated, human teams replaced by automated systems the report says cannot read Sheng or Swahili or the cultural context of Kenyan gendered abuse, and trust and safety teams cut entirely. The timing, it says, “coinciding with the approach of Kenya’s 2027 electoral cycle, is a cause for specific concern”.
What participants said
The study is qualitative: 22 key informant interviews and focus groups in Nairobi, Kisumu and Mombasa. Participants are identified by role only, under the consent protocol agreed with them.
One survivor described a former partner posting her intimate photographs in 2018 to a Facebook group tied to her home village. “Everyone had access. Messages and calls came from every direction. It was a very dark, lonely period.”
Another respondent said: “The online-to-offline continuum is not theoretical. It is the story of how women are dying in this country.”
A third pointed at the vacuum the report wants filled. “We have policies in the country, but there is no policy that addresses TFGBV directly. Nobody knows what to call it.”
The first of its seven recommendations is a standalone legal framework with an official definition, closing gaps in the Sexual Offences Act. Amendments to that Act, reported by the Daily Nation on 4 August, would create offences of making or sharing sexually explicit deepfakes, sextortion, stalking and voyeurism — two decades after it was passed, and two years before Kenyans vote again.