When speaking up becomes risky

Introduction

Across communities in Kenya, human rights defenders work to document violations, support communities and raise concerns about issues affecting people's rights and participation in public life. But doing this work can come with risks.

Through TVZote, Amplified Access worked with the Coalition of Grassroots Human Rights Defenders in Kenya to create a safer way for human rights defenders to report incidents, document threats and contribute to a broader picture of what is happening across communities.

“When defenders cannot safely report what is happening, threats can remain invisible.”

One report captures one person's experience. But when similar reports begin appearing across different places and at different times, they can reveal something more.

TVZote was created to bring these experiences together and make emerging risks to human rights defenders and civic space easier to understand.

Hearing what the numbers can miss

Traditional human rights and governance data can tell us a great deal about violations, institutions, and civic space. But it may not always capture what threats look like at the level where defenders and communities experience them.

People describe intimidation, harassment, restrictions on civic activity, and other incidents that affect their ability to speak, organise, and participate in public life.

Community reporting creates another layer of evidence, one grounded in what human rights defenders and communities are seeing and experiencing themselves.

How we listened

TVZote was developed with the Coalition of Grassroots Human Rights Defenders in Kenya to make reporting more accessible across languages and communities.

Reporting in familiar languages:

Human rights defenders could submit reports in the languages they were most comfortable using, reducing the need for communities to translate their experiences before sharing them.

Voice and text reporting:

Reports could be shared through text or voice, giving defenders different ways to describe what was happening.

Translation and organisation:

TVZote helped transcribe, translate, and organise reports so that information submitted in different languages could be understood together.

Connecting related reports:

Reports could then be explored across location, time and incident type, helping recurring reporting patterns become easier to identify.

Privacy by design:

Personal information and precise locations could be limited or generalised where necessary to help protect people submitting reports, particularly where reporting itself could create additional risks.

A picture began to emerge

As reports accumulated, individual experiences started to connect.

Related reports

1450

Communities

8

Languages

5

Reporting period

8months

Where reports came from

Reports were submitted by human rights defenders across 2 counties in Kenya, with TVZote available in 5 languages. The reporting helped surface experiences relating to threats, harassment, intimidation and other risks affecting defenders and civic space.

From evidence to action

Listening is only useful if what communities and defenders share can inform what happens next.

The evidence generated through TVZote can support conversations between human rights defenders, organisations, and other stakeholders working to protect civic space.

Reports can provide additional context for investigation, advocacy, protection, coordination, and accountability.

Why it matters

The people closest to threats to civic space often understand dimensions of them that aggregate numbers alone cannot show.

Community reporting provides a way to capture those experiences as they happen.

When human rights defenders can report in their own languages and those reports can be understood, connected and explored together, individual experiences can contribute to a clearer understanding of the conditions affecting civic participation.

Safeguarding the people who document rights violations and defend civic space is part of safeguarding the space in which communities can speak, organise and participate in democracy.