IGF 2025 Networking Session #74 Mapping and addressing digital rights capacities and threats

The session will showcase multi-country research findings on digital rights capacities and threats. It will also explore successful strategies and tools currently in place to build digital rights awareness and digital literacy skills, particularly among persons belonging to historically marginalised and oppressed groups (such as youth, women, LGBTQIA+ people, migrants, indigenous people, racial and ethnic groups in the global majority, people with disability, and the elderly). To this end, the session will commence with a series of poster presentations or visual overviews of the most relevant information extracted from primary research and analysis recently conducted in Bolivia, Cambodia, Palestine, Somalia and Vietnam (TBC). This will give participants a picture of the current situation of digital rights capacities and threats in a diverse set of Global South countries and demonstrate the work civil society organisations and other stakeholders are doing to address the situation. To foster active participation and networking, the session will then move into moderated breakout group discussions where both speakers and participants, grouped by their areas of expertise or interest, will brainstorm and share strategies and tools for building digital rights awareness and digital literacy skills, especially of people in vulnerable situations and at greater risk of technology-facilitated abuse or harm. Each breakout group will focus on a different aspect between policy analysis and development, capacity building and community engagement. Participants will also be encouraged to share information about existing tools that will be collated and added to an open online repository developed in the framework of a multi-country program, led by Oxfam and co-funded by the European Union, known as “Recentering the Civic Internet through Partner Engagement (ReCIPE).” After the session, participants will have a deeper understanding of digital rights capacities and threats across different contexts and better knowledge of actionable strategies and available tools to build digital rights awareness and digital literacy skills, fostering a collaborative effort and international cooperation to create a more rights-respecting digital ecosystem for all. The session aims to attract participants from different stakeholder groups, but is particularly envisioned to foster networking among civil society and other operational organisations working in the Global South with marginalised and vulnerable groups.

Participants online and on-site will engage in an interactive discussion using an online tool (e.g. Zoom webinar chat) or remarks and questions directly to the speakers, to foster-real time engagement. Speakers will rely on digital poster presentations, providing a flexible and engaging way to convey the most relevant information extracted from primary research and analysis recently conducted in their respective contexts. Active participation will also be sought through the breakout groups where the discussion will be moderated by one of the speakers to ensure interaction with participants online and on-site. Furthermore, participants will be encouraged to continue engaging with the speakers after the session, in the framework of the ReCIPE project.