Ford Launches Global Network to Help Social Justice Groups Manage Risks and Rewards of Tech

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Whether it’s Zoom meetings, Slack channels, contactless payments or GPS, digital technology has become an unavoidable part of our day-to-day lives, and our reliance only grew since the onset of the pandemic. While it’s often a positive force, technology can also cause great harm. 

We've seen this play out in real time again and again in online harassment campaigns, or the spread of misinformation on topics like elections and vaccines, for example. Aside from the toll on individuals, technology has been weaponized against organizations that seek to advance human rights. And while this is certainly true in the Global North, in the Global South especially, the work of these organizations is often restricted, excluded from support and intimidated. 

To help counter this, the Ford Foundation has launched the Global Network for Social Justice and Digital Resilience, an initiative that seeks to embrace technology and its potential, while also minimizing the risks associated with the use of technology. The network, which will be managed by an independent board, will provide support for organizations that offer technological support to civil society organizations in the Global South. 

Ford has provided $15 million in seed funding for the initiative, and an independent board made up of seven civil society funders and experts on digital matters will manage the network and select the grantees. The first cohort of 10 organizations include Derechos Digitales (Chile), Fundación Acceso (Costa Rica), and the Centre for Internet and Society (India). 

“Over the course of the pandemic, [Ford] decided that we needed to make a significant investment in terms of enhancing the capabilities of social justice organizations in the Global South to embrace technology. We call it digital resilience," said Alberto Cerda Silva, technology and society program officer. 

According to Silva, Ford kept the language "deliberately ambiguous" so that the programming could not only address problems related to technology, but also embrace its beneficial possibilities, including fundraising, campaigning and crowdsourcing. 

Support for the network is part of Ford's ongoing work involving technology and the Global South. Earlier this year, a Ford-backed report looked at the impacts the digitization of the economy has had on workers and their rights, focusing especially on those in the Global South. While Ford is currently the sole funder of the Digital Resilience Network, Silva hopes that the network's success will inspire other donors and funders to support work that builds technological capabilities in the Global South.

Challenging power

Organizations that advocate for social justice, including racial, gender and environmental justice, face increasingly sophisticated efforts to hinder or outright eliminate their work. These tech-related attacks can take many forms, including the hacking of websites to delete research, spyware that targets human rights advocates, and other forms of surveillance.

“In some cases, especially around elections, we've seen targeted attacks that are blanket across various social justice actors, but also citizens in general cases of internet shutdowns or restrictions of access to specific platforms that are critical to electoral integrity, for instance, or reporting human rights violations during protests or elections,” said Ashnah Kalemera, program officer at the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA), one of the network's grantees. 

Kalemera added that targeted organizations are usually those that are “at the forefront of fighting for human rights or pushing for justice,” including organizations that focus on issues like women's rights, marginalized or minority groups, media and journalists, and organizations that work around environmental rights (check out IP’s coverage of the Goldman Prizes for more on support for environmental defenders).  

The reasons behind these attacks are pretty clear-cut. “When we're talking about social justice organizations, we're talking about organizations that are mobilizing for social equality. Their mission… challenges the location of power. That may be political power, may be economic power, may be social power. And consequently, it shouldn't come as a surprise that for certain governments, corporations or social actors, these social organizations became a risk,” Silva said. “The very mission of these organizations is to challenge power, and power tries to defend itself, to protect itself, to preserve their privileges by targeting these communities.”

The members of the Digital Resilience network all work to address the attacks leveled at organizations that challenge power, and the obstacles they face. In Brazil, for example, Núcleo de Pesquizas, Estudios y Formación (Instituto Nupef) is an organization that promotes the safe use of information and communication technologies, focusing on expanding the use of technology among civil society organizations, social movements, and communities that experience social and economic vulnerability. Its work includes providing support for Indigenous people, Babassu coconut breakers, and quilombolas, descendants of Afro-Brazilian slaves. 

“These people are the most prominent environmental defenders in the territories in the Amazon region,” said Oona Castro, institutional development director at Nupef. “They are the ones resisting every day to protect the environment and territories and lives and culture.”

These efforts to protect the environment, however, come with a number of challenges, including threats of violence to the people doing the work, along with arson, deforestation, the implementation of monoculture, and harm to the soil. Such actions, Castro said, often come from players who have an economic interest or stake in the land. 

Nupef offers assistance via several means. This includes things like technological capacity-building and bolstering infrastructure to provide web services for social organizations working in the region. The latter is especially important given the difficulty — and sometimes outright lack — of internet access in the Amazon territories.

Support rooted in the Global South

One of the biggest strengths of the Digital Resilience Network is that the cohort organizations providing technological support are themselves based in the Global South. Traditionally, the groups that have provided support on such issues are based in the Global North, and are often insufficiently equipped for the job. This is due to several reasons. First, groups located in the Global North often lack the necessary cultural, political and social understanding of the Global South, which varies from country to country and region to region. 

“Many of the risks and opportunities associated with technology for social justice organizations in the Global South are very contextual,” Silva said, citing language as an example. “And that context may vary significantly from one place to another.” 

Internet shutdowns and social media blockages, both of which can greatly hinder advocacy efforts, are not as common in the Global North as they are in the Global South, and as such, organizations may not have the tools and knowledge needed to address these issues. Organizations like CIPESA, for example, which works across Africa to promote effective and inclusive tech policy and its implementation, have experience in addressing such matters.

Organizations located in the specific regions they serve are also better equipped to offer support in remote regions. CIPESA has made recent efforts to provide "digital security support, tools, tips and tricks" to communities that are hard to reach. 

A second reason organizations based in the Global South are better equipped to address the needs of civil society groups in the region is that the technology itself is different. Silva noted, for example, that while iOS-based mobile devices are prevalent in the Global North, they are far less common in the Global South, where Android is the go-to means of communication. 

In addition, ownership of technology in the Global South is much more communal, as not every individual will have their own phone or laptop. “It's community infrastructure. The community has a cellphone. The community has a computer.… The community has internet access. And therefore, digital security is much more collective," Silva said. 

Peer-to-peer network

Another important aspect of the Digital Resilience Network is the peer-to-peer support it offers. As Silva notes, the types of attacks civic organizations face vary from country to country, and each cohort member has a different area of expertise. One organization may have expertise with online harassment, where another may have experience in recovering content from websites that have been hacked or shut down. By coming together to share their knowledge, organizations can find solutions to their problems. 

"Given that the network consists of organizations that are working at the intersection of social justice and technology in the Global South, we are very keen on the opportunity to share knowledge and learn collectively," said Kalemera, adding that the network will also provide an opportunity to strengthen their tech capacity. 

In Mexico, for example, some of the highest-risk populations are civil society rights advocates and journalists, with Mexico being the deadliest country in the world for journalists. Journalists and human rights defenders have had their devices infected with Pegasus spyware. SocialTIC, a Mexico-based NGO provides journalists and social justice organizations and changemakers with the skills needed to keep themselves safe in digital ecosystems. 

"One of the things we've suffered but have also been really aware of is that the technology scene is very complex and has evolved very, very fast. Specifically, the malware industry… is evolving really quickly. And it's very hard for forensic and digital security labs, like ourselves, that are supporting people at risk to keep up with so many different kinds of technologies," said SocialTIC's cofounder and CEO Juan Casanueva. He added that many of the issues are complex and would be better addressed through collaboration.

Since malware is one of SocialTIC's areas of focus, it can not only share its knowledge with other network members, it can also work with the network as the issue continues to evolve. 

"Most of the [network's] resources are oriented to allow people to come together to think, reflect and to collaborate on specific initiatives together," Silva said. "We expect that by creating this space, the learning will travel much easier, much faster, to meet the needs of communities.… We expect to see more collaboration among these groups."

For Kalemera, the network also presents an opportunity to experiment with open source technology and infrastructure to see how resilient it is in the context of their operations and the varied expertise within the network. The network, she said, will serve as "an incubation or hub for experimentation."

“Ultimately, all of those opportunities feed into our wider organization works' direction that would not only enhance resilience and health as organizations, but also the overall sustainability of our work,” Kalemera said.