Becoming a Safe Sister and Digital Rights Activist – Sandra Enih reflects on her journey
In 2022, the Safe Sister program reached out to Women for a Change requesting the nomination of women’s rights defenders and journalists to attend the Safe Sister program that specifically targeted women activists in DRC and Cameroon. As a feminist organization, we intentionally recommend individuals living in marginalized communities in the country with limited awareness and opportunities for digital security training and programs. In the recommendations, we also ensure that it is intergenerational. For the training, five women were selected for this training, and Sandra Enih is one of the Safe Sisters. In the journey of becoming a Safe Sister, Sandra Enih recollects what it all meant so far, “being a young activist and a women human rights defender; I faced numerous challenges as far as the digital revolution is concerned. Either my account gets hacked, and my password changed, or I get violated in one way or another online, with individuals sending malicious links, attachments, and contents. With the limited knowledge, I had concerning digital security, I mostly fell for such acts. When Women for a Change shared the information on the safe sisters’ Fellowship, which is for women human rights defenders and activists like myself that trains them to be able to understand and respond to the digital security challenges they face in their work and daily life, I felt my dreams have come to pass but yet not with all hopes as I had not received the confirmation yet”.
“On this faithful day on 16 September 2023, I received a confirmation email from the defend defenders team saying CONGRATULATIONS on your selection for the safe sisters’ fellowship program. The joy was uncontrollable, and it was indeed a dream come through. Throughout that time till the actual date of the program, which was from the 03-07 of October 2022, we received pre-assignments that helped us navigate and understand some concepts before the training program. While in the pearl of Africa, specifically in Kampala, we had a great and dynamic team of participants /facilitators, now sisters. It was an amazing five days with experienced facilitators that trained us on encryption, Mobile hygiene which I was so bad at as I had a lot of junk files and un-updated applications in my phone, making it slow and freezing; this challenge was solved during the training.
In addition, we understood malware and device protection, especially enabling 2Factor authentication, which is a secondary protection on our application, setting strong passwords for our devices and encryption. It helped me change from using names as passwords to using strong passwords from passphrases which cannot be guessed or hacked, for example, 1T&@t86@m@@4gE (a password generated from the passphrase & leveraging technology-based approaches to engage boys and men as allies for Gender equality. Indeed, it was a fantastic experience to learn and take actions that support me as an individual in the digital world. Most importantly, how to stay protected, especially having our conversations spied on or being traced on what we do online, with the use of the Virtual Private Network (VPN), which was the case that we faced when we had internet short down in the northwest region. It was terrific as we easily could relate to what we as activists face daily, especially online gender-based violence.
