Community-Led Data as a Catalyst for Democracy and Protection

During the opening session at last month’s #FIFAfrica24 in Dakar, Senegal, Tanzanian MP Hon. Neema Lugangira suggested that civil society is ‘loud but ineffective,’ while parliamentarians, quietly working behind the scenes, get results.

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While we ???????? Lugangira’s enthusiasm for greater collaboration between civil society and politicians, her statement misses a critical point. Most of the communities we work with at Data4Change aren’t loud. Not because they don’t want to be, because they can’t be.?

For communities under threat, being loud can be dangerous. They are silenced by systems that exclude, surveil, and even criminalise them. This is why community-led citizen data initiatives are essential. They enable at-risk groups to turn their personal stories into data, creating a collective, evidence-based voice.?

Our panellists at #FIFAfrica24 explored this theme during our session, From Voices to Variables to Voices: Community-Led Data as a Catalyst for Democracy and Protection. Now, over to our session moderator Wevyn Muganda , to share the highlights.

Wevyn Muganda is a member of Data4Change’s CODEC Council. She recently founded Arctive Citizens, an organisation focused on empowering marginalised communities in Kenya through civic engagement and data advocacy.

WM: Last month I was invited to moderate a Data4Change panel at the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa (FIFAfrica) in Dakar, Senegal. The session looked into the complexities of self-advocacy and underscored the importance of creating space and providing tools for minoritised groups to meaningfully participate in shaping the policies that affect their lives.

Our panellists—Mercy Mutemi (Nzili Sumbi Advocates), Ndawula Eric (Lifeline Youth Empowerment Centre), Catherine Anite (Small Media), and Awoke Dagnew (Hope International)—shared rich insights from their individual work, while unpacking the shared challenges activists face across the African continent.?

These challenges include structural barriers such as discriminatory laws, pervasive surveillance, and shrinking civic space, which make it increasingly difficult for minoritised groups to influence public and political discourse. This exclusion is further compounded by the criminalisation of identities, repression through intimidation, censorship, lack of political will, and outdated legal frameworks.

Despite these barriers, a common theme emerged—community-led data as a transformative tool for enhancing democracy and protection. Self-advocacy, when strengthened by data collected by communities themselves, enables minoritised groups to take control of their narratives and develop solutions grounded in their lived experiences. This creates a powerful, evidence-based platform for advocacy, bridging the gap between them and decision-makers.

Now, let’s hear from our panellists.

Mercy Mutemi, a digital rights lawyer, emphasised the importance of ethical data collection in litigation, especially in her work scrutinising algorithms and content moderation processes as she takes Big Tech companies like Meta to court (and wins!).?

She stressed the need to hold Big Tech accountable for algorithms that harm African users by amplifying hate speech and deepening social divides, and she advocates for better working conditions for content moderators.

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Mercy underscored how community-led data offers a fuller picture of those impacted by injustices, helping to build trust in legal processes. However, she cautioned that rushed, under-resourced data collection risks visibility without real impact.?

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Strengthening collaboration between litigators and civil society organisations is vital to ensuring data collection is thorough, empathetic, and victim-centred. Civil society organisations, with their deep connections to affected communities, provide the access and context needed to gather comprehensive data, while litigators bring the legal expertise to transform that data into evidence.?

Mercy’s approach reminds us that power and integrity in legal advocacy come from investing the time, care, and resources needed to collect data on lived experiences with both dignity and accuracy. This duty of care extends well beyond the court ruling. As Mercy notes, a lawyer's responsibility to protect clients' dignity and safety doesn't end when the gavel comes down.

Ndawula Eric , the Executive Director of Lifeline Youth Empowerment Centre (LYEC), an organisation advocating for LGBTQIA+ rights in Uganda, highlighted the power of self-advocacy through data. By collecting and sharing their own data, communities can reclaim the dignity often stripped away by mainstream narratives and government repression.

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Eric’s project Equal Victims uses community-led data to highlight intimate partner violence (IPV) within Uganda’s GBQ community, a group often overlooked in mainstream data collection. Their advocacy challenges legal systems and social norms that suppress LGBTQIA+ narratives.

In their efforts to gather sensitive data, Eric and the LYEC team recognised that traditional, more extractive data collection methods, like questionnaires, could retraumatise victims. To address this, Data4Change co-designed a new data collection methodology called Power Portraits with LYEC and trusted local psychologists.

In Power Portraits, participants select from a set of highly stylised visual elements to build personalised "portraits" that reflect their individual experience. This approach supports participants to share their stories in a way that feels safer and more expressive, while transforming their experiences into tangible, visual data.?

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Equal Victims transforms personal stories into powerful, evidence-based advocacy, while ensuring that individuals feel respected and valued throughout the process. LYEC also ensured counsellors or psychologists were available to support participants if needed. While collecting these stories is vital, Eric emphasises it must never come at the expense of the community’s safety or mental health.

Awoke Dagnew 's initiative Hear the Blind Spot, pushes the boundaries of data activism by transforming data into sound. This innovative approach, co-designed during a Data4Change sprint in 2019 in partnership with Together!, an Ethiopian charity Awoke continues to volunteer with, ensures that even those who cannot visually engage with data can participate in advocacy conversations. By sonifying data, the project provides an opportunity for visually impaired individuals to access and engage with information in a meaningful way.

When we first met Awoke, he shared how primary school children with visual impairments in Ethiopia were excluded from computer lessons because teachers didn’t believe they could learn. Hear the Blind Spot addresses this kind of underestimation by creating an experience accessible to both sighted people and those with visual impairments.

Together!’s broader work has empowered over 10,000 visually impaired people through technology education and advocacy, tackling societal issues like their exclusion from demographic surveys. Awoke emphasises that ethical data collection is built on trust, informed consent, and transparency.

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Unlike many data-driven advocacy projects that focus solely on policymakers, Hear the Blind Spot ensures the community is actively part of the advocacy process, experiencing it alongside the decision-makers. The project targets both groups in a shared experience, avoiding data extraction and reinforcing the idea that the data belongs to the community.

Hear the Blind Spot shows how data can become a powerful tool for advocacy, bridging gaps in digital access and championing disability rights in an inclusive and dignified way.

Catherine Anite , our final panellist, highlighted the importance of co-creation and partnerships in building effective advocacy strategies. Through her leadership of UPRoar, Catherine she connects civil society with decision-makers at the UN, showing how locally sourced data can drive reform, even where data collection is seen as an act of dissent.

UPRoar operates in over 30 countries across Africa, the MENA region, and Central Asia, supporting local advocates to advance freedom of expression, access to information, and digital rights. Catherine emphasised that data collection efforts must be adapted to each community’s context, political environment, and risks, underscoring the importance of localisation and community expertise.

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UPRoar Tools, co-developed with Data4Change, is a powerful suite of data-driven resources that helps civil society navigate the UN’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process. Built on over 90,000 rows of data from the Universal Human Rights Index API, these tools lower barriers to international advocacy.

UPRoar Tools equips advocates to identify key diplomatic relationships through its Matchmaker feature. The chatbot-style Recommendation Builder guides advocates through the process of crafting a targeted, UN-appropriate recommendation. Estonia, for example, has frequently adopted digital rights recommendations from UPRoar’s partners, demonstrating the impact of data-driven advocacy.

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Ultimately, Catherine explains, UPRoar’s data-driven approach equips local advocates to navigate global advocacy more effectively. You can explore UPRoar's recommendations, submissions, and fact sheets here.

And back to our moderator, Wevyn Muganda , for her final reflections. Wevyn is the founder of Arctive Citizens and a member of Data4Change’s CODEC Council.?

WM: As the dust has settled from #FIFAfrica24 and I reflect on the panel and the broader context of advocacy in Africa, it’s clear that community-led citizen data is a catalyst for democracy and protection. It empowers at-risk groups to overcome the systems that try to silence them.

While we’ve made progress, there is still a long way to go in ensuring that minoritised groups are meaningfully engaged in decision-making processes. We see the potential for change through the work of leaders like Mercy, Eric, Awoke, and Catherine. Their efforts remind us that the fight for self-advocacy is a fight for inclusion and for justice.