Zaina Foundation & Team Community – Internet Freedom Global Meet up – November 30, 2023
Preparing for the 2024-2025 elections and Addressing Surveillance and Censorship in Tanzania
Zaituni Njovu, ED at Zaina Foundation was invited as featured guest to join other digital rights practitioners from around the world during weekly meetup on Internet Freedom Community Chat base platform to address issues of Surveillance and Censorship in Tanzania ahead to elections in 2024 and 2025 for local government and president respectively.
Zaina Foundation is a non-profit organisation which promotes the state of digital rights and inclusion in Tanzania.
Foundation’s Strategic areas for 2023 – 2025 include;
- Raise awareness on digital security to women journalists in 10 regions here in Tanzania.
- Advocacy on Internet Freedom in Tanzania through the project title; Internet Shutdown Fellowship in Tanzania. In this project we have 20 fellows. We work together on training, advocacy on social media, radios and by word of mouth to predict and prepare the community in case of any censorship during the upcoming election in Tanzania.
- Digital Voice Project to young activists in learning Institutions here in Tanzania. We advocate ending OBGV among young activists and increase participation of women online.
- Localisation and Translation of open source tools into swahili language especially circumvention tools as we are heading to election in Tanzania.
- Lead Digital Rights Coalition as a collective force in Tanzania on advocacy and push the government to be accountable on citizens rights to privacy and rights to freedom of expression in Tanzania.Proceedings of the meetup; After introduction activists focused on the agenda; Preparing for the 2024 & 2025 elections and addressing Surveillance and Censorship in Tanzania.Below questions were the main focus during glitters meetup.
- Firstly, for those who are not familiar, can you give us a quick overview of the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) regulations on VPN use in Tanzania?
- The TCRA has reported that the implementation of the VPN regulation is to support Regulation 16(2) of the Electronic and Postal Communications (Online Content) Regulations of 2020 which bans Tanzanians from content deemed illegal. Can you give us a general idea of the kinds of content that have been branded illegal under this regulation and / or what content has been actively censored in Tanzania leading up to this point?
- What have been the early impacts of the VPN regulation since its implementation? How are activists, media and civil society impacted?Who will ultimately be the most impacted by the VPN regulation?
How will the VPN regulation impact the 2024 elections in Tanzania? And are there other censorship and surveillance tactics being used in parallel with the VPN regulation leading into these elections?
Are there other countries regionally in which you are seeing VPN policy moves in a similar direction as Tanzania and Uganda?
We appreciate all our stakeholders and new partners attending the meetup and looking forward to staying in touch through new collaborations!Zaina Foundation collaborates on promoting digital rights and inclusion in Tanzania.Cheers!#DigitalRightstz