'Thick skin is costly': Inside Cecilia Maundu’s digital safety crusade
Cecilia Maundu, the digital safety trainer and founder of Digital Dada Podcast.
What you need to know:
- A digital safety trainer turns survivors’ pain into evidence, pushing for accountability in online gender violence spaces.
- Through training, storytelling, and advocacy, she is reshaping how society understands and fights online violence.
When the topic is tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), Cecilia Maundu shows up and gets lost pouring herself into a subject she is deeply passionate about: digital safety. She is a trained broadcast journalist, a digital security trainer, and an African Union Media Fellow. But those titles only tell part of the story.
The real Cecilia is the one who sits across from women who have been torn apart online, listens to their pain, and helps them turn that pain into evidence. She is a celebrated podcaster on the Digital Dada podcast, which she runs alongside her operations manager, Easter Pefuli, and her social media manager, Raylene Kambua.
She started the podcast because, in her own words, she realised that too many people were suffering in silence. “My work lives at the messy intersection of technology, human rights, and journalism. And I will be the first to tell you that online violence is not virtual at all. It is very, very real,” she sighs.
Cecilia’s journey into the ICT world began in 2016. Back then, mainstream media had not fully understood how active online audiences had become. “Facebook was still the biggest platform and while Twitter existed, it was not as vibrant as it is today.”
Read: Tech-fuelled violence: Why women are unsafe in digital spaces and struggle silently with scars
Then she got into a fellowship called Safe Sisters, run by Internews and Defend Defenders. “The goal was to train women; especially women journalists and women in ICT, to become digital safety trainers. There was a huge gap of female trainers and they were attempting to address this gap,” she intimates.
Cecilia was in the first cohort. “It involved self‑study, mentorship, and workshops. Literally, you are being introduced into the IT space,” she says.
After the fellowship, she started doing trainings and she loved empowering those she trained. But she quickly ran into a problem. “You can only train 12 to 20 people at a time. The information was not reaching enough people. Worse, online violence was almost invisible in mainstream media. I felt I needed to do more to reach a wider audience.”
So she started a podcast and pitched the idea to the Association for Progressive Communications. They gave her funding. In 2019, three years after the Safe Sisters training, Digital Dada was born.
Digital Dada started as a way to interview female journalists who had been through the worst of online violence. “I wanted more than storytelling. I wanted accountability because online violence is still regarded as not real violence,” she says.
“Up to today, if you ask people, they’ll say, ‘Oh, but they’ve not touched you. Grow a thick skin.’ But thick skin is very expensive.”
Over the years, Digital Dada has morphed to feature women from across fields, not only journalists. “I choose to only feature women because the online violence that women face is way more lethal as compared to what men receive. Hardly are men sexualised when being trolled. But that is the first thing that happens to women. They are shamed with their bodies, their children, their looks.”
In her wildest dreams though, she never thought trolling would happen to her. Then it did. She once interviewed and featured someone on her podcast, uploaded the video, and went about her day. Her phone died and when she finally came back online in the middle of the night, she found a storm of messages.
People were calling her a bad interviewer. Saying she did not know what she was talking about. Sending her screenshots of the abuse. “Hate hurts,” she says. “Whether it’s from a stranger or anyone and it hurt me that once. The trolling and the bad comments got to me.”
She took down the video. She let the trolls win and for a year, she did not record another episode. Digital Dada was silent for a year because the founder, the one who sought to fight TFGBV through the channel, was a victim of the same demon she set-out to slay. But she eventually decided to bounce back.
“I talked to one of my mentors,” she recalls. “Then I asked myself: why did I originally start this podcast? The purpose was to bring visibility to a problem that is always minimised. I was actually doing the opposite of what I advised in my trainings. I was letting the trolls silence me.”
She returned because she realised silence only makes things worse. “TFGBV is amplified by victim shaming and stigma. When you choose silence, there is no data to inform policy. And good policies are informed by good data.”
Artificial Intelligence
Cecilia has watched the online space morph over the years. Now artificial intelligence is changing the game again and mostly for the worse. “With AI, things like deepfakes and synthetic media have made it even worse,” she says. “Sometimes you ask yourself, when are we going to get over this? But you don’t lose hope. You keep fighting.”
She is particularly worried about algorithms. “An algorithm is just an opinion that is fed on a computer,” she explains. “When there are more men feeding those opinions, it becomes very patriarchal. Algorithms are the kingmakers. They don’t reward content, they reward interaction and that is why bad news and drama spread faster.”
Her solution is more women in tech. “We need more girls in ICT. These are the women who will be sitting at the table making decisions that trickle down to the end users – which is us.” She also pushes for safety by design and human‑centred design.
“When they are creating platforms, they should think about tech‑facilitated gender‑based violence from the start. Not waiting for it to explode. And design with the people, not for the people. Bring the end user to the table from the beginning.”
Over years of training, Cecilia has collected a set of practical habits that she shares with everyone from journalists to teenage girls in informal settlements. She starts with the simplest thing: a strong password.
“Alphanumeric, including all characters. Your password is your first line of defence.” Then she adds two‑factor authentication – “like having a burglar‑proof door and another door. If someone opens the first, they still cannot open the second”.
She also insists on different passwords for different accounts. “One password for everything is like having one key for your house, your car, and your locker. That is not possible.”
She advises people to check their app permissions regularly. “M-Pesa, for example, does not need your camera. Apps are harvesting your information without you knowing.”
She warns against public Wi‑Fi because it is not encrypted. If you must use it, she says, use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) – not a free one, but Proton VPN has a good free version. She recommends privacy‑focused tools like Signal for secure messaging, and Brave browser or DuckDuckGo browser because they block ads and trackers.
She even tells people to “DuckDuckGo yourself” – search for your own name using a privacy‑friendly search engine to see what information is out there about you. “You cannot know what to protect unless you know what is out there.”
She says, the same way we wake up to go to our daily hustles, the same way a hacker wakes up to prey on people whenever. “Just make it difficult for this hacker to get your information. Apply this simple tips and be digital safe.”
On oversharing on the internet, she is firm. “Any information online could one day be used against you. Ask yourself: who needs to know this? You genuinely do not need to share everything on socials because if anything, no one really cares. Some things are also better shared later. Do not go announcing everything in real time. If you must, just wait out. But I am not encouraging silence and inactivity online, all I am saying is, be wise with what you share.”
She also urges people to read community guidelines. “That is why people lose accounts. They violate rules they never read.”
And perhaps most importantly, she preaches digital detox. “Take time offline… even for a few hours. Tech companies own our eyeballs. Be intentional.”
In case trolls come for you, Cecilia has a clear, calm plan for anyone who finds themselves being attacked online. “First, prioritise your safety. Online violence can go offline. Avoid engaging directly with trolls.”
Second, she says, document everything. Take screenshots. Save links, usernames, dates and times. “A time will come when the law catches up, and that evidence will go through forensic analysis.”
Third, report to the platform. “They need data to know what is happening. Use block, mute, restrict who can comment.”
Fourth, do not go through it alone. Call a friend. Reach out. Share what you are feeling. And if you need to, take a break. “That is not surrender but self‑care. I always advise that you give yourself time away from the platform but do not quit all together because quitting is handing over power to the trolls,” she notes matter-of-factly.
Training and mentorship
Cecilia is a product of training and mentorship and to pay it forward, she mentors young girls in informal settlements like Kibra, where online violence often spills into the physical world. She sits with them, listens to them, and makes sure they know there is space for everyone no matter where they come from.
Her proudest moment is seeing Digital Dada quoted in and mentioned in research papers. “This to me means that someone is watching and consuming the information, and that means that the purpose, which is data collection and accountability is being served,” she beams.
To any woman healing from online violence, Cecilia offers this: “Give yourself time. Be kind to yourself. It is okay to feel the way you are feeling. But do not leave the online platform. We need your voice if we are to win this war. Just take a detox when you need to.”
Her parting shot is simple but powerful. “Let us keep the online space safe, let us encourage healthy conversations. But most importantly, let us make sure the digital gender divide gap is closing with each passing day.”
Cecilia Maundu has learned that words on a screen can cut deep, but she has also learned that silence helps no one. “That is why I picked my microphone again and I am not putting it down again,” she says confidently.
