Civil society under digital pressure.
Civil society organisations across West Africa operate in an increasingly hostile digital environment. Cyber-attacks, phishing campaigns, surveillance, account compromises, and platform takedowns have become regular features of the work, alongside the broader trends of civic space restriction, internet shutdowns, and legal repression. The pressure intensifies around elections, when the cost of operating insecurely rises sharply for activists, independent media, and the organisations supporting them.
The CiviConnect platform, hosted by Jeunes Verts, exists to bring together civil society organisations, independent media, academics, and activists across West Africa into a shared collaborative environment. As the digital threat landscape intensified, Jeunes Verts mandated PANEOTECH to expand the platform with a substantive digital resilience layer, supported by the Digital Defenders Partnership Sustainable Protection Fund and aligned with the work of CIVICUS, ICNL, and the European Union on civic space across the region.
The mandate. Build a digital resilience layer that civil society organisations across West Africa can actually use, integrated into the existing CiviConnect platform, covering on-demand digital security guidance, structured risk assessment, and real-time incident reporting, all under a stable, secure technical foundation.
Three integrated tools, one civic space platform.
PANEOTECH delivered three substantive digital resilience tools, each addressing a distinct operational problem facing civil society organisations across the region. All three are integrated into the CiviConnect platform rather than deployed as standalone pilots, ensuring they are part of the platform's permanent architecture and available to every member of the community.
DigiGuard, AI Digital Security Agent
An always-available AI agent that provides real-time, contextual digital security guidance to civil society organisations. Trained on a curated knowledge base of practical advice on account protection, phishing response, secure communications, data protection, and incident response, with the conversational depth needed to handle the kinds of urgent situations the live training cycle could not cover.
RiskRadar, Digital Risk Assessment
A structured self-assessment tool that walks organisations through a comprehensive questionnaire covering communications security, access controls, software lifecycle, backup procedures, and incident response readiness. Generates a personalised risk profile with actions prioritised by severity and likelihood, each linked to relevant resources for immediate follow-through.
DigiWatch, Real-Time Incident Reporting
A reporting and visualisation system for incidents affecting civic space and digital rights across the region. Structured submission, secure storage, and an interactive map that surfaces hotspots and trends in real time, building an evidence base that supports advocacy campaigns and the West Africa Civic Space Index.
Hardened Platform Infrastructure
The CiviConnect platform was migrated to a higher-performance, better-secured hosting environment, with framework upgrades to current stable versions and infrastructure provisioning that guarantees stability and availability for at least the next two years.
Engineered for civil society realities.
The architectural choices follow directly from the operational reality of civil society organisations across West Africa. Connectivity is uneven. Technical capacity varies widely between organisations. The threat environment is hostile and evolving. Each tool is designed to be useful immediately, without specialist training, while contributing to a shared evidence base the network can rely on collectively.
AI agent over a curated knowledge base
DigiGuard runs on PANEOTECH's Rafiki AI platform with a domain-specific knowledge base curated for the realities of West African civil society. The agent is grounded in the source material, returns contextual guidance with appropriate caveats, and supports natural conversation rather than rigid menu navigation. The architecture supports future deployment to messaging channels once external platform constraints permit.
Structured assessment over a vulnerability taxonomy
RiskRadar maps the most common digital vulnerabilities affecting civil society organisations into a structured taxonomy, then exposes them through an accessible questionnaire. The scoring engine produces a personalised risk profile and routes organisations directly from assessment to action, with each recommendation linked to concrete resources. The design supports repeated assessments over time, so organisations can track improvement rather than treating digital security as a one-off audit.
Native incident reporting over a geospatial layer
DigiWatch was built natively rather than adapted from existing reporting platforms, in order to integrate cleanly with the rest of the CiviConnect environment, control the data model, and meet the security and user experience requirements of the network. Reports are stored securely and visualised on an interactive map with filters for incident type, country, and time window, supporting both individual response and aggregated regional analysis.
Stable platform foundation
The underlying CiviConnect platform was migrated to a higher-performance hosting environment, with framework versions brought up to current stable releases and security configurations hardened. Hosting was prepaid for the multi-year horizon, ensuring that the digital resilience tools rest on a foundation that will not shift under them during the period civil society organisations need them most.
Built for civil society across West Africa.
The platform serves a community of over fifty civil society organisations across Togo, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Côte d'Ivoire. The digital resilience tools were designed to be especially relevant during high-risk election cycles across the region, when the cost of operating insecurely rises sharply, and the platform infrastructure was hardened on the same horizon, so the tools remain available through the periods that matter most.
Partners and institutional ownership.
The CiviConnect Digital Resilience Platform was delivered by PANEOTECH for Jeunes Verts, who host and operate the platform on behalf of the regional civil society community. The work was supported by the Digital Defenders Partnership Sustainable Protection Fund, with the broader CiviConnect platform aligned with CIVICUS, ICNL, and the European Union's engagement on civic space across West Africa. PANEOTECH led the technical design, development, and deployment of the three digital resilience tools and the underlying platform hardening. The platform is now in production, with the tools fully integrated into the permanent architecture and Jeunes Verts owning the operational responsibility going forward.
