Tech Explained: WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY: Women’s Leadership in Addressing Emerging Threats to Peace and Security: Artificial Intelligence and Technology-Facilitated Violence in Simple Terms

Tomorrow (9 March), the African Union Peace and Security Council (PSC) will convene its 1334th open session on Women’s Leadership in Addressing Emerging Threats to Peace and Security: Artificial Intelligence and Technology-Facilitated Violence. The meeting will take place virtually and forms part of the Council’s continued engagement with the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda across Africa.

Following opening remarks by Almon Mahlaba Mamba, Permanent Representative of the Kingdom of Eswatini to the African Union and Chairperson of the PSC for March 2026, Bankole Adeoye, Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, will deliver introductory remarks. Liberata Mulamula, Special Envoy of the Chairperson of the AU Commission on Women, Peace and Security (WPS), is also expected to make a presentation to the Council, followed by a statement from Justice Effie Ewuor, Co-Chair of FemWise-Africa, and a presentation by the Representative of UN Women. Additionally, statements are also expected from PSC Members, AU Member States, and Regional Economic Communities/Regional Mechanisms (RECs/RMs).

The 1334^th session continues the PSC’s institutionalised engagement with the WPS agenda, formalised as a standing item at its 223^rd meeting in March 2010. Since institutionalising the WPS agenda, the PSC has convened 28 dedicated sessions, with this 1334th meeting extending its thematic scope to women’s leadership against AI and technology-facilitated violence. While the Council has made evident progress through thematic expansions, encompassing women’s roles in preventing violent extremism, displacement/refugee protection, media accountability, economic integration, and WPS linkages to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), these advances remain ad hoc and inconsistent.

The session convenes amid a sharply deteriorating continental peace and security landscape, marked by protracted conflicts in Sudan, eastern DRC, the Sahel, and the Horn of Africa, where women’s leadership proves indispensable for tackling both AI-driven threats and technology-facilitated violence. Protracted conflicts in the Sahel, Great Lakes region, and Horn of Africa, exacerbated by Sudan’s war, renewed eastern DRC violence, and Somalia’s instability, continue fueling mass displacement, humanitarian crises, and civilian atrocities. Women and girls suffer disproportionately, facing conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), early/forced marriage, economic exclusion, and barriers to peace processes. In many contexts, sexual violence serves as a deliberate war tactic, while shrinking civic space stifles activism; now, AI-amplified disinformation, cyber-harassment, and online gender-based violence compound these risks, demanding women-led strategies for digital resilience and accountability.

This backdrop renders tomorrow’s PSC session pivotal, as the rapid proliferation of digital technologies and AI is reshaping political communication, conflict dynamics, and social interactions across Africa. Artificial intelligence and emerging digital technologies are also expected to become a major driver of economic transformation on the continent, with projections indicating that they could add around $1.5 trillion to Africa’s GDP by 2030. While offering avenues for economic growth, innovation, and governance gains, including the emergence of women-led digital peacebuilding tools, these technological advancements are also generating new risks. In particular, they have enabled forms of technology-facilitated violence that disproportionately target women in public life, including peacebuilders, journalists, activists, and leaders.

Tomorrow’s session offers an opportunity for the PSC to rigorously assess how AI-driven threats and digital technology violence are intensifying conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), eroding civic space, and systematically targeting women peacebuilders, journalists, activists, and leaders amid governance erosion and escalating crises on the continent. A 2024 UNU-Interpeace report on sub-Saharan Africa reveals AI-generated deep fakes and botnets fueling ethnic polarization and undermining peacekeeping efforts in the DRC, while a 2025 study across 11 countries documents devastating cases: Ethiopia’s Mayor endured deep fake pornography viewed 562,000 times (90% believed it is real), and Cameroon’s Brenda Biya faced coordinated harassment reaching 8.9 million via 92 identical posts evading moderation through ‘spamouflage.’ Binding Hook’s 2026 analysis escalates the urgency, showing generative AI’s low-cost scalability in gendered disinformation, exemplified by election deep fakes targeting women politicians in Ghana, Namibia, and Kenya that inflict reputational harm, psychological trauma, and civic exclusion by exploiting patriarchal norms. These platform-amplified attacks, where outrage boosts engagement 15-20%. In highlighting these challenges, the PSC may explore the gaps that exist in the legal and policy instruments, including the AU Continental Results Framework (CRF), such as missing tech-threat indicators and the need for digital impact assessments in PSOs and WPS-tech reports, and harmonised monitoring to safeguard women’s roles in peace processes.

Beyond the digital information environment, the Council may consider how AI-enabled technologies are also reshaping the conduct of warfare itself. Emerging battlefield technologies also highlight the growing intersection between AI and the changing nature of warfare on the continent. Recent analysis, including Amani Africa’s annual review on emerging weapons trends, points to the rapid proliferation of drones as a new ‘weapon of choice’ in several African conflicts. In contexts such as Sudan, their use has had devastating consequences for civilians, particularly in urban areas, with women and girls often bearing disproportionate impacts through civilian deaths, injury, displacement, loss of livelihoods, and heightened insecurity. These developments underscore the urgent need for stronger regulatory and accountability mechanisms governing AI-enabled and algorithm-assisted weapons systems to prevent further civilian harm and deepening gendered vulnerabilities in conflict settings.

The AU has forged a robust normative architecture to tackle AI-driven threats within the WPS agenda. Key instruments include the African Union Digital Transformation Strategy (2020–2030), which promotes inclusive digital ecosystems but lacks WPS-specific mandates; the African Union Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection (Malabo Convention), establishing data safeguards yet ratified by only 16 states as of 2026; and the PSC’s recent call for a continental AI-governance-peace advisory mechanism. Complementing these, WPS pillars draw strength from the Maputo Protocol (2003) and the landmark AU Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls (2025), which explicitly criminalises ‘cyber violence’, encompassing deep fakes, doxing, and algorithmic harassment, while the Continental Results Framework (CRF) drives gender-disaggregated monitoring. Yet weak domestication, chronic underfunding, and missing tech-threat indicators hobble enforcement.

Against this backdrop, tomorrow’s 1334^th session may be used by the PSC to strategically operationalise these frameworks amid AI’s profound disruption of conflict dynamics, governance, and gender equality. The PSC may probe tech-WPS intersections, such as disinformation undermining women mediators in Sudan/DRC, and champion targeted measures: embedding cyber violence indicators in CRF/NAPs; accelerating Malabo ratifications; empowering the AI advisory mechanism with women leaders; and mandating gender audits of peace operations’ digital protocols. This decisive pivot could convert aspirations into accountable action, fortifying women’s leadership in tech-resilient peace architectures.

The Council may also consider how to strengthen coherence between national and continental frameworks by encouraging the alignment of the growing number of National Action Plans (NAPs) on Women, Peace and Security, now adopted by more than 37 AU Member States, with emerging digital threat assessments and technology governance initiatives. Integrating considerations such as AI-driven risks, cyber harassment, and technology-enabled gender-based violence into these NAPs could support more comprehensive prevention strategies while enabling Member States and Regional Economic Communities/Regional Mechanisms to better anticipate the intersection between technological change and existing conflict drivers. In this context, the PSC may further emphasise the importance of promoting women’s participation in digital governance and technology policy spaces. As artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies increasingly shape governance and security systems, ensuring that women contribute to policy design and decision-making processes will be essential for preventing technological innovation from reinforcing existing gender inequalities and for advancing more inclusive, gender-responsive peacebuilding approaches.

The session also offers the PSC a critical opportunity to assess progress in women-led innovations addressing emerging AI-driven security risks, including AI-enabled early-warning systems and gender-responsive digital mediation platforms. While African women demonstrate strong potential in the technology ecosystem, accounting for 47% of STEM graduates globally, the highest share worldwide, their participation sharply declines in the technology workforce, where they constitute only 23–30% of professionals in the tech sector. Moreover, structural barriers continue to limit access to the digital ecosystem: only about 31–32% of women in Africa use the internet compared to 42–43% of men, significantly constraining women’s ability to develop digital and AI-related skills and to contribute to technological governance and innovation.

It is therefore expected that the Council may use the session to evaluate how initiatives such as women-focused AI training and entrepreneurship programmes, such as those supporting over 100 African women entrepreneurs trained in data science, machine learning, and AI innovation through UNESCO-supported initiatives, can be scaled to strengthen women’s leadership in digital peacebuilding. At the same time, the PSC could address persistent structural barriers, including women’s underrepresentation in technology policy spaces and limited access to investment for women-led tech ventures. Building on AU’s gender-parity commitments, the Council may prioritise targeted capacity-building in cybersecurity, AI governance, and digital peacebuilding, while encouraging Regional Economic Communities/Regional Mechanisms (RECs/RMs) to deploy women experts and establish women-led digital security task forces capable of developing scalable, Africa-rooted responses to AI-enabled threats.

Beyond the rapidly expanding digital domain, the session may also situate AI- and technology-facilitated violence within the broader spectrum of structural and emerging threats affecting women and girls across Africa. These include climate-related insecurity, violent extremism, protracted displacement, and deepening economic marginalisation, issues highlighted during the 2025 Cotonou Meeting on Women, Peace and Security as key drivers of gendered insecurity on the continent. Economic governance frameworks may also feature in this discussion, particularly where digital transformation intersects with gender inequality. For instance, while continental initiatives such as the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol aim to expand digital markets and cross-border trade, their largely gender-neutral design risks overlooking structural constraints that continue to limit women-owned MSMEs, including restricted access to finance, high transaction costs, and persistent digital connectivity gaps. In this regard, the session may provide an opportunity for the PSC to deliberate on how gender-responsive approaches can be more systematically mainstreamed across the tools of the AU peace and security architecture, including early warning mechanisms and regular Council briefings, while ensuring that responses to emerging technological threats are linked to broader socio-economic and governance reforms.

The expected outcome of tomorrow’s session is a communiqué. The Council may call for stronger measures to address the growing risks posed by artificial intelligence and technology-facilitated violence within the framework of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. In this regard, the PSC may urge Member States to integrate digital threats, including AI-driven disinformation, deep fakes, and online gender-based violence, into National Action Plans on WPS and to align these frameworks with continental instruments and emerging technology governance initiatives. The Council may also encourage accelerated ratification and domestication of the African Union Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection and call for the inclusion of indicators on technology-facilitated violence within the African Union Continental Results Framework on Women, Peace and Security to strengthen monitoring and accountability. The PSC may further underscore the importance of promoting women’s leadership in digital governance and AI policy processes, including through the expansion of women-led innovation and mediation networks such as FemWise-Africa, while encouraging Member States, Regional Economic Communities/Regional Mechanisms and the African Union Commission to invest in digital literacy, cybersecurity capacity-building and women-led technological solutions for early warning, conflict prevention and peacebuilding.