Meet Kemi, the WhatsApp chatbot supporting survivors in West Africa
Developed by Girls Not Brides member Brain Builders Youth Development Initiative, the AI-powered chatbot offers confidential support to anyone who has experienced technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV).
Cyberstalking, deepfakes and doxxing: digital technology is providing perpetrators of gender-based violence with new and ever-evolving ways of carrying out harm. But it’s also giving gender rights organisations more tools than ever before to support those affected.
Enter Kemi, the AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot recently launched by Girls Not Brides member Brain Builders Youth Development Initiative (BBYDI) in Nigeria.
Kemi offers confidential support to anyone who has experienced technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) – an umbrella term for any form of abusive behaviour that targets someone because of their gender and is at least partly carried out using digital tools. This includes mobile phones, social media platforms and messaging apps, like WhatsApp.
“Are you experiencing repeated unwanted contact or harassment online?” is one of the questions Kemi might put to a user, as part of a so-called “health check” to help them work out if they are being abused.
“Has someone shared or threatened to share your personal information or images without your consent? Do you feel unsafe or threatened by someone’s actions online?”
Urgently needed support
Users start a chat with Kemi by sending a WhatsApp message to a number provided by BBYDI (a simple “Hi” is enough). They are then asked to select one of six locally spoken languages – English, French, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Pidgin – and for their consent to continue, before being guided through a conversation to help them find the information and resources they need.
“As digital spaces become increasingly central to education, communication, commerce, and civic engagement, so too have they become battlegrounds where entrenched gender inequalities are replicated and amplified.”
Hussain Taibat Aduragba, BBYDI’s TFGBV Programme Specialist
Co-created by survivors, Kemi can answer questions about the different types of TFGBV, signpost users to services and share information about reporting a case of TFGBV – either to the online platform on which it took place or to local authorities.
“The rise of Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) stands as one of the most pressing yet under-acknowledged challenges confronting women and marginalised groups in Nigeria,” BBYDI’s TFGBV Programme Specialist, Hussain Taibat Aduragba, said in a recent report on the issue.
“As digital spaces become increasingly central to education, communication, commerce, and civic engagement, so too have they become battlegrounds where entrenched gender inequalities are replicated and amplified.”
A double-edged sword
But a key factor behind TFGBV being such an urgent issue in Nigeria is also what makes Kemi such a potentially useful tool: the country’s rapid growth in internet access over the past decade, which has seen it become one of the largest internet markets in the world.
As of August 2025, more than 140 million Nigerians (almost 65% of the population) were online, largely via mobile phones.
Technology’s dual role as both a threat and a force for good is already well-known to those working in the gender-based violence space. Back in 2021, a Girls Not Brides brief on the impact of Covid-19 on efforts to end child marriage highlighted how mobile apps “can help girls and women report [gender-based violence] and child marriage, and identify girls and women at risk”. However, it also warned of the risks that come with more children and adolescents accessing the internet: online child sexual exploitation, online harassment, bullying and other types of cyber violence.
The same year, a joint report by Unicef and HIAS underlined the “ambiguous relationship” that migrant, displaced and refugee girls in Latin America and the Caribbean had with social media.
“On the one hand, it helps girls and adolescent girls to maintain links and updated information; and on the other, they are exposed to multiple messages of hypersexualisation of their bodies,” the report said, stressing that the internet was “a space that often puts them at risk of receiving sexual, xenophobic, and racist attacks and assaults”.
‘High-tech and high-trust’
AI, which is used to power Kemi, has come under increasing scrutiny for the risks it poses to children and young people. From its use as a tool to create highly realistic fake images of sexual abuse, to instances of chatbots and virtual assistants giving out harmful advice, the negative impacts are wide-ranging.
“We are not here just to launch a chatbot. We are here to launch a movement: one where survivors are seen, heard, and supported, and where technology becomes a tool for justice, not harm.”
Olasupo Abideen Opeyemi, BBYDI’s Global Director
But BBYDI’s Global Director, Olasupo Abideen Opeyemi, assures that their WhatsApp chatbot – which draws on information in a West Africa-focused gender-based violence database that was specially built by BBYDI – is designed to prioritise survivors’ safety and wellbeing.
“We held 41 feedback and testing workshops across the region to ensure that the solution we created wasn’t just high-tech, it was high-trust,” he said at the launch event.
“We are not here just to launch a chatbot. We are here to launch a movement: one where survivors are seen, heard, and supported, and where technology becomes a tool for justice, not harm.”
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