From Nairobi to Narrm: SOW-Kenya at Women Deliver 2026

Lilian Olivia Orero, Founder & Executive Director, SafeOnline Women Kenya at WD2026

Women Deliver 2026 brought together thousands of advocates, researchers, funders, and activists from across the world in Melbourne, Australia — on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation — for four days of conversation, challenge, and collective action. For SafeOnline Women Kenya (SOW-Kenya), it was more than a conference. It was an opportunity to bring the voices of African women survivors of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) into one of the most influential spaces in the global gender justice movement.

Why Melbourne Mattered for Us

SOW-Kenya was born from a simple but urgent truth: the internet has become a primary site of gendered harm, and the women most affected — particularly in the Global South — are least represented in the policy rooms and funder conversations that determine how that harm is addressed.

When We Are Purposeful invited us to attend Women Deliver 2026 as a sponsored delegate and to speak at a funder-activist dialogue panel, we saw it as exactly the kind of bridge we are trying to build: between frontline experience and institutional decision-making, between the women we serve in Kenya and the global conversations that shape their rights.

Youth Deliver: Starting Where It Should Start — With Young People

Before the main conference opened, I had the privilege of attending the Youth Pre-Conference, Youth Deliver, organised by Restless Development and the YIELD Hub. The half-day convening drew young activists from across the world and was structured around something rare in multilateral spaces: genuine dialogue about power.

The conversations that struck me most were about structural barriers — not just to women’s safety, but to the organisations working to deliver it. Short grant cycles. Restrictive reporting requirements. The persistent preference for “scalable” interventions over the relational, community-rooted work that actually changes lives. And the quiet, insidious “credentialing tax” — the way well-grounded youth-led organisations from the Global South are routinely excluded from global forums because they lack the right institutional affiliations, the right network introductions, or the right kind of documented track record that tends to be defined by those already in the room.

Being in that room — even to name these dynamics — matters. It is one reason SOW-Kenya shows up.

Panel Discussion

The Panel: Reclaiming the Digital World

On 30 April, I joined fellow speakers for the session “Reclaiming the digital world: insights from youth activists and funders.”

The session held space for something that rarely happens at global conferences: an honest reckoning between those who fund feminist digital rights work and those who do it. What does meaningful support for TFGBV response actually look like? What do funders need to understand about the realities on the ground? And what do activists need from funders beyond the grant cheque?

My contribution to that dialogue was grounded in what SOW-Kenya has learned since 2023 — through our TechSecure Literacy Curriculum, through accompanying survivors, and through the painful, necessary work of building institutional infrastructure as a young organisation during a first major grant period. The women we serve do not experience “digital safety” as a discrete programme area. They experience it as part of daily life — navigating online harassment alongside insecure housing, economic precarity, and inadequate legal recourse. Funding and advocacy frameworks that do not reflect that complexity will always fall short.

Demonstrating SafeHer on the Global Stage

The highlight of our participation — and, I’ll admit, the part that made me most nervous — was the live demonstration of SafeHer, our survivor-centred covert documentation and safety tool, which launched on Google Play Store on 2 April 2026.

To show SafeHer to an international audience of funders, activists, and technologists, at one of the world’s foremost gender justice conferences, was a profound moment. This app was built not in a Silicon Valley accelerator but in partnership with survivors, for the realities they face. Its covert interface, incident reporting functionality, Guardian network, and AI-assisted classification features exist because women told us exactly what they needed — and we listened.

The response in the room confirmed what our community partners have told us: that technology designed with survivors, rather than for a general market, looks and feels different. It centres dignity, agency, and safety at every click.

What We Are Taking Home

Women Deliver 2026 reaffirmed several things we believe deeply at SOW-Kenya.

Digital safety is not a niche issue. It belongs — without apology — in every conversation about health, rights, and power. The women most affected by online violence are not a footnote to the gender justice movement; they are at its centre.

Funder-activist dialogue, done well, is transformative. It requires funders willing to listen without defensiveness, and activists willing to speak without performing gratitude. We are grateful to We Are Purposeful and Purposeful for creating the conditions for that kind of honest exchange.

And finally: presence matters. Every time an organisation like SOW-Kenya occupies space in a global forum — not as a case study, but as a speaker, a peer, a partner — it shifts something. Slowly, and then all at once.

We returned to our work more connected, more energised, and more clear about the urgency of what we are building.