16 Days of Activism Campaign 2025
These circumstances demanded approaches that balanced public engagement with participant safety while ensuring that advocacy efforts remained relevant, inclusive, and impactful.
Rather than limiting its focus to public awareness, the campaign deliberately repositioned itself as a national platform for advancing accountability, strengthening survivor protection, promoting digital safety, and confronting the structural drivers of gender-based violence. Guided by survivor-centred, evidence-informed and conflict-sensitive principles, the campaign brought together government institutions, development partners, members of the GBV MKUKI Coalition, media practitioners, legal professionals, academia, community leaders, organizations of persons with disabilities and civil society organizations in a coordinated response to emerging and persistent forms of violence against women and girls.
Throughout the campaign, WiLDAF and its partners implemented a series of complementary interventions designed to influence policy, strengthen institutional accountability, amplify survivor voices and expand public engagement.
These included the National Dialogue on Technology-Facilitated Violence and Violence Against Women in Politics and Elections, the GBV Data Journalists Bootcamp, the Anti-GBV Caravan, strategic digital advocacy and monitoring initiatives, and the Anti-GBV Champions Awards, each addressing a different dimension of gender-based violence while contributing to a common vision of safer, more inclusive and accountable communities.
A defining feature of the 2025 campaign was its responsiveness to the rapidly changing landscape of violence. The campaign highlighted the growing threat of technology-facilitated violence, including online harassment, coordinated digital attacks and violence targeting women participating in politics and public life. At the same time, community engagements exposed the continued prevalence of domestic violence, child marriage, harmful disciplinary practices, economic abuse and institutional barriers preventing survivors from accessing justice and support services. These findings reinforced the understanding that violence against women and girls is increasingly multidimensional, requiring integrated responses that bridge the digital, political, institutional and community spheres.
Despite the constraints imposed by the post-election environment, the campaign demonstrated remarkable adaptability. Following comprehensive risk assessments, selected public activities including the National Launch and parts of the Anti-GBV Caravan and Champions Awards were redesigned or rescheduled to safeguard participants while preserving the campaign’s objectives. This adaptive approach enabled the campaign to maintain momentum, protect advocacy spaces and continue engaging communities without compromising the safety and dignity of participants.
Beyond implementation, the campaign generated valuable evidence to inform future policy and programming. Community dialogues, digital monitoring, media engagement and survivor interactions revealed emerging trends in online misogyny, violence against women in politics, institutional accountability gaps and persistent social norms that perpetuate violence. These insights strengthened national conversations on gender justice while providing an evidence base for future advocacy, policy reform and institutional strengthening.
The campaign also reaffirmed the importance of partnerships. Its success reflected the collective commitment of government institutions, development partners, the GBV MKUKI Coalition, civil society organizations, journalists, legal professionals, community leaders and survivors themselves. By working collaboratively, these actors strengthened public awareness, expanded access to survivor-centred support, promoted ethical media engagement and reinforced accountability for preventing and responding to gender-based violence.
Ultimately, the 2025 Sixteen Days of Activism Campaign demonstrated that ending gender-based violence requires more than annual awareness activities. It requires sustained partnerships, survivor-centred approaches, evidence-informed advocacy, institutional accountability and long-term investment in transforming the systems, norms and power structures that enable violence to persist. The experiences and lessons documented in this report provide a strong foundation for strengthening future national campaigns and advancing a Tanzania where women and girls can participate safely, exercise their rights fully and live free from violence.