This project explores how young people across the Sahel are using digital tools to engage in politics, shape electoral processes, and influence democratic change. Focusing on Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Guinea, Mali, Niger and Togo, the project examines the growing role of social media platforms, messaging apps, online campaigns, and digital networks in youth-led civic activism during elections and political transitions.
The study conceptualises digital activism as a broad spectrum of practices, ranging from hashtag movements and online petitions to citizen-led election monitoring, political commentary, and the documentation of protests or state actions. It asks how these online activities translate into real political influence by amplifying youth voices, pressuring institutions for transparency, contesting dominant narratives, or creating new forms of participation that blur the boundaries between digital and physical political spaces.
Methodology
Rather than undertaking large-scale primary data collection, the research adopts a comparative case-study approach, treating each country as part of a wider regional ecosystem of digital and political transformation. By analysing documented cases, policy and legislative frameworks, media archives, and existing social media datasets, the project maps the “digital civic ecologies” within which youth activism emerges, circulates, and is constrained or enabled.
Comparison lies at the heart of the study. It traces patterns of youth digital mobilisation across contexts, examines how states respond through policy, regulation, repression, or accommodation, and follows how ideas, symbols, and strategies travel across borders. This approach illuminates why digital youth activism becomes politically consequential in some settings, while being contained, co-opted, or suppressed in others.
The project also pays close attention to the role of platforms, algorithms, and information infrastructures in mediating power relations between young activists, political elites, and the state. In a region marked by fragile democratic transitions, military rule, shrinking civic space, and intensifying digital authoritarianism, digital arenas have become a critical terrain for political participation and contestation.
Research objectives
- To analyse how youth digital activism shapes electoral politics and political transitions in the Sahel, examining the mechanisms through which online mobilisation translates into political influence, contestation, or institutional change.
- To examine state responses to youth digital activism, including legal, regulatory, technological, and coercive measures, and assess how these responses reshape digital civic space, electoral integrity, and democratic accountability.
- To identify the contextual factors that enable, constrain, or neutralise youth digital mobilisation, with particular attention to political regimes, legal frameworks, platform governance, and socio-cultural conditions across different Sahelian contexts.
- To trace the transnational and cross-border dynamics of youth digital activism in West and Central Africa, mapping how ideas, tactics, narratives, and symbols circulate across countries and contribute to a regional digital political culture.
- To generate comparative, policy-relevant insights that inform digital governance and electoral integrity frameworks, including African Union norms and national policies, in order to strengthen democratic resilience and meaningful youth participation in fragile and transitional contexts.
For more on this project, explore the concept note.
