From 23 to 26 June 2026, a three-person delegation from the Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD) joined Magamba Network, DefendDefenders, and consortium partners in Harare for the first annual consortium meeting of NAFASI — the Sida-funded continental initiative that launched in February 2026 to secure Africa’s digital civic space against state repression and corporate technology misuse.Over three days in Harare, the three implementing partners of the NAFASI consortium convened for their first annual programme meeting since the project’s launch in February 2026 — a 36-month programme that runs through to early 2029. The meeting, convened and hosted by Magamba Network as Lead Applicant, gathered the senior leadership of all three partner organisations to take stock of the first five months of implementation, align on theory of change, and confirm the operational architecture for the year ahead, with attention to governance, financial controls, and communications.RFLD was represented in Harare by a three-person delegation: Heuleche Tognonmegni, Abigael Olaleye, and Ashifie Gogo. The delegation was present throughout the meeting, took part in every plenary session, and led one of the consortium’s most consequential conversations — the Gender Mainstreaming session on the afternoon of Wednesday 24 June. As the Implementing Partner for West and Central Africa, and the consortium’s designated Feminist & Francophone Bridge, RFLD also presented its three-year theory of change and implementation logic alongside Magamba Network and DefendDefenders during the opening plenary, mapping how the five RFLD activities articulate with the consortium’s three strategic pillars.NAFASI — Swahili for “space” — is a continental commitment to defend the space, online and offline, where civil society, journalists, and women human rights defenders do their work.NAFASI brings together three organisations with complementary mandates. Magamba Network, the Zimbabwean creative-civic powerhouse behind Moto Republik and Moto Labs, leads the consortium and anchors its work on digital threat landscaping, infrastructure, and storytelling. DefendDefenders, headquartered in Kampala, brings the East and Horn of Africa region and operates the 24/7 digital security helpline that NAFASI will scale. RFLD, with offices in Porto-Novo, Dakar, Accra, and Banjul and a member network of 670 organisations across the continent, brings francophone and lusophone reach, an afrofeminist methodology, and continental policy engagement through its ACHPR Observer status.Together, the three partners will deliver against the consortium’s three strategic pillars: policy and governance, digital resilience and truth, and network power and sustainability. The pillars were set out by Kudzayi during the NAFASI Overview session, and elaborated in the Theory of Change discussion that followed.The meeting situated NAFASI in the continental context. Koliwe Majama, the veteran digital rights advocate, delivered the meeting’s keynote on the State of Digital Democracy in Africa — tracing the contours of a shrinking digital civic space, the rise of AI-driven disinformation, and the deliberate use of internet shutdowns as instruments of repression. Her remarks set the political stakes of the work ahead and provided the consortium with a shared analytical baseline.Later in the meeting, the partners were thrown into a mock shutdown crisis coordination drill led by Munya Dodo on behalf of Moto Labs — a live-fire exercise designed to test how the three organisations would coordinate in real time during a continental digital emergency. The drill made one thing immediately clear: NAFASI’s value lies as much in the speed and quality of its inter-organisational coordination as in any single activity it delivers.From analysis, the consortium turned to architecture. Paul Munatsi of Digital Society Africa made the case for African-owned digital infrastructure, arguing that data sovereignty and cloud independence are prerequisites — not afterthoughts — for resilient civic space. The consortium then worked through how it will learn, with the NAFASI Impacts and Insights Officer presenting alongside RFLD’s and DefendDefenders’ Learning Officers on indicators, accountability, and data collection. A dedicated session on Sub-Granting, Financial Management, and Anti-Corruption Training, led by Magamba’s Finance and Admin Team with the NAFASI Grants Officer, set out the compliance and disbursement architecture that will govern the consortium’s flow of resources.RFLD enters the second half of NAFASI’s first year of implementation with an institutional identity the consortium was designed around. The organisation is a pan-African afrofeminist network — not a gender-aware organisation, but a political-methodological body whose work is built inside African feminist thought and operationalised through the proprietary Gender Mainstreaming Tool. That distinction matters across the 36 months of NAFASI, because the consortium’s gender mainstreaming architecture is a continental-scale measurement system, and it has to be carried by an Implementing Partner that owns the methodology rather than borrows it.The force underwriting that identity is operational. Four registered country offices in Porto-Novo, Dakar, Accra, and Banjul. A member network of 670 civil-society organisations across 35+ African countries. Active programme delivery in 15+ countries. ACHPR Observer Status No. 553/2017 — the formal diplomatic standing that converts programme work into shadow reports, resolutions, and Special Rapporteur engagement. Continental policy hubs — DƆNÙESÈ, the Maputo Protocol Hub, the ACDEG Hub, the West Africa Legislative Platform — that reach all 55 African Union member states.What the combination produces is this: an Implementing Partner that can carry francophone and lusophone reach, afrofeminist methodology, continental policy access, and the protection of Women Human Rights Defenders inside a single institutional vehicle.The annual meeting closed with a Commitments Café — a structured session in which each partner organisation tabled concrete commitments and timelines for the year ahead. RFLD’s commitments mapped to its five workplan activities: bi-annual digital rights training workshops, high-level diplomatic dialogues on spyware and TFGBV, the West African Environmental Justice Network for Women Human Rights Defenders, consortium-wide Gender Mainstreaming and GESI integration, and the addition of French and Portuguese desks to the pan-African digital security helpline.The delegation returned from Harare with the consortium’s governance framework reaffirmed, the workplan harmonised across partners for the year ahead, and a shared understanding of how the work will land in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Bénin, Togo, and the other 15+ countries where RFLD operates directly.