Speaking Freely: Aji Fama Jobe

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Aji Fama Jobe is a digital creator, IT consultant, blogger, and tech community leader from The Gambia. She helps run Women TechMakers Banjul, an organization that provides visibility, mentorship, and resources to women and girls in tech. She also serves as an Information Technology Assistant with the World Bank Group where she focuses on resolving IT issues and enhancing digital infrastructure. Aji Fama is a dedicated advocate working to leverage technology to enhance the lives and opportunities of women and girls in Gambia and across Africa.

Greene: Why don’t you start off by introducing yourself? 

My name is Aji Fama Jobe. I’m from Gambia and I run an organization called Women TechMakers Banjul that provides resources to women and girls in Gambia, particularly in the Greater Banjul area. I also work with other organizations that focus on STEM and digital literacy and aim to impact more regions and more people in the world. Gambia is made up of six different regions and we have host organizations in each region. So we go to train young people, especially women, in those communities on digital literacy. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the past four or five years. 

Greene: So this series focuses on freedom of expression. What does freedom of expression mean to you personally? 

For me it means being able to express myself without being judged. Because most of the time—and especially on the internet because of a lot of cyber bullying—I tend to think a lot before posting something. It’s all about, what will other people think? Will there be backlash? And I just want to speak freely. So for me it means to speak freely without being judged. 

Greene: Do you feel like free speech means different things for women in the Gambia than for men? And how do you see this play out in the work that you do? 

In the Gambia we have freedom of expression, the laws are there, but the culture is the opposite of the laws. Society still frowns on women who speak out, not just in the workspace but even in homes. Sometimes men say a woman shouldn’t speak loud or there’s a certain way women should express. It’s the culture itself that makes women not speak up in certain situations. In our culture it’s widely accepted that you let the man or the head of the family—who’s normally a man, of course—speak. I feel like freedom of speech is really important when it comes to the work we do. Because women should be able to speak freely. And when you speak freely it gives you that confidence that you can do something. So it’s a larger issue. What our organization does on free speech is address the unconscious bias in the tech space that impacts working women. I work as an IT consultant and sometimes when we’re trying to do something technical people always assume IT specialists are men. So sometimes we just want to speak up and say, “It’s IT woman, not IT guy.” 

Greene: We could say that maybe socially we need to figure this out, but now let me ask you this. Do you think the government has a role in regulating online speech? 

Those in charge of policy enforcement don’t understand how to navigate these online pieces. It’s not just about putting the policies in place. They need to train people how to navigate this thing or how to update these policies in specific situations. It’s not just about what the culture says. The policy is the policy and people should follow the rules, not just as civilians but also as policy enforcers and law enforcement. They need to follow the rules, too. 

Greene: What about the big companies that run these platforms? What’s their role in regulating online speech? 

With cyber-bullying I feel like the big companies need to play a bigger role in trying to bring down content sometimes. Take Facebook for example. They don’t have many people that work in Africa and understand Africa with its complexities and its different languages. For instance, in the Gambia we have 2.4 million people but six or seven languages. On the internet people use local languages to do certain things. So it’s hard to moderate on the platform’s end, but also they need to do more work. 

Greene: So six local languages in the Gambia? Do you feel there’s any platform that has the capability to moderate that? 

In the Gambia? No. We have some civil society that tries to report content, but it’s just civil society and most of them do it on a voluntary basis, so it’s not that strong. The only thing you can do is report it to Facebook. But Facebook has bigger countries and bigger issues to deal with, and you end up waiting in a lineup