Why Digital Climate Campaigns Fail in Africa: My Professional Reflection on Digital Power

When I reflect on the last 11 years spent navigating the high-stakes world of climate advocacy, it is clear that we are at a point of profound transition. The landscape of digital mobilisation has shifted, yet many of our most vital missions remain tethered to an outdated playbook. In the rooms where global strategies are born, I still see the same recurring "Copy-Paste" trap: a frantic attempt to take a campaign that was a viral hit in London or New York and expect it to ignite the same fire in Nairobi or Lagos. But these Global North models are built on the luxury of stable high-speed fiber and low data costs. When we export them without a deep, grounded understanding of the regional reality, we aren't just losing engagement; we are effectively becoming invisible to the very people we need to reach.

In the African context, digital is not a separate sphere of life; it is the utility through which life happens. However, that utility comes with high costs and a mobile-first constraint that global offices often overlook. If your strategy requires a 5MB landing page, you’ve essentially built a digital wall rather than a bridge. To win here, we have to respect the user’s data balance and bandwidth. The data bears this out: the GSMA Mobile Economy Africa Report shows that the "usage gap", remains the single biggest barrier to digital inclusion on the continent. We need to build with that physical constraint in mind from day one, not as an afterthought.

I often see organisations mistake tech procurement for strategic power. They invest hundreds of thousands in high-end CRMs like Salesforce, but then treat the people managing them as administrative support rather than strategic leads. A tool is not a strategy; it’s a Ferrari. Without an architect to design the Ladder of Engagement, that Ferrari just sits in your digital garage, gathering dust. Real digital power is found in the integration, how your data moves and triggers real-world action. If your data isn't moving your supporters toward leadership, your movement is standing still.

The real revolution across the continent isn't happening on public feeds; it’s happening in "Dark Social." While we might love a post with thousands of likes on Instagram, high-stakes organising is occurring in encrypted WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, and Signal threads. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report confirms this massive shift toward private messaging for mobilisation in the Global South. If we aren’t building secure, automated pipelines that land directly in a supporter's hand, we aren't organising; we are just broadcasting to an increasingly algorithm-suppressed public.

This leads to what I call the "Leaky Pipe." It’s a pattern where you launch a petition for a COP summit, get thousands of signatures, and then follow it with three months of silence. By the time you ask for a second action, the trust has evaporated. Digital mobilisation must be a perpetual cycle of engagement, not a series of one-off events. We have to stop treating digital as the "comms department" and start treating it as the campaign's nervous system. This requires a shift from extractive storytelling, harvesting Global South voices just to trigger guilt-donations in the North, toward building a Narrative Infrastructure that lets local voices lead. Code for Africa is already proving that localised, tech-enabled storytelling is the only way to counteract misinformation and build lasting trust.

The most dangerous gap we face right now, however, is the Intelligence Gap. Most NGOs are data-rich but insight-poor, with years of donation histories sitting in dormant "warehouses." While the fossil fuel lobby uses predictive AI to map political shifts in real-time, we are often stuck looking at spreadsheets of what happened last month. We have to move toward Predictive Organising. I'm working on a tool called DIRA Engine that will allow us to turn raw data into active insight, anticipating what supporters need before they disengage.

But even the most advanced AI won’t save a campaign if the staff is intimidated by the tech. This is the Capacity Paradox. I don’t believe in 'set it and forget it' consultancy; true digital power is about what your team is capable of doing after the collaboration ends. That’s why I’ve integrated strategic facilitation and training into everything I do. We have to build the human architecture of the movement alongside the digital one. The climate crisis isn't waiting for us to get our digital acts together. We need strategies that are as intelligent as they are grounded. If we finally achieved the digital scale we’ve been chasing, would our current internal culture be strong enough to hold the weight of that power, or would the machine outpace the movement?