The University of Manchester’s Research impact, shaped together campaign highlights how collaboration can help turn research into action that supports real-world change. One featured story focuses on our work with the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) and partners in Ethiopia to better understand online misogyny and gender-based violence, and to support safer digital spaces for women and girls. 

Online abuse can silence women and girls, damage reputations and limit their participation in public life. In Ethiopia, our partners found that women’s experiences of this were often dismissed as isolated examples because there was limited data to show the scale and nature of the issue. To address the issue, The University of Manchester worked with Ethiopian civil society and human rights organisations, alongside local language experts, to build a clearer and more reliable evidence base. 

The project was shaped through trust, shared decision-making and local expertise. Partners helped define the research questions, identify the platforms to study and ensure that cultural meaning was properly understood. This was especially important when analysing harmful content, where language, sarcasm and context can vary significantly across different cultures and communities. 

The partnership has produced validated data, a labelled dataset and a multilingual lexicon that underpin 34 national policy recommendations, helping communities advocate for safer online spaces and giving policymakers and digital platform providers evidence they can act on. Follow-on research is also continuing through an Africa Futures PhD studentship at The University of Manchester, focused on improving how artificial intelligence tools handle languages with limited digital datasets. 

• Learn more: Read the full case study and watch the accompanying film here.