The project, which is in partnership with the Leadership and Advocacy for Women in Africa (LAWA) Ghana, is aimed at developing a gender-responsive law or amendment to existing laws with a specific focus on deepfake abuse, online impersonation and synthetic sexual content.
At a workshop in Accra to solicit inputs from stakeholders, the Executive Chairperson, LAWA, Sheila Minkah-Premo, said while Ghana had made significant progress in addressing violence against women and advancing gender equality, existing legal and institutional frameworks in the country did not adequately capture AI-enabled forms of abuse.
Therefore, she said law-enforcement agencies, regulators, ministries and civil society organisations were increasingly encountering these harms in practice, often without clear legal definitions, investigative tools or coordinated response pathways.
She said the country’s expanding digital ecosystem had created new opportunities for participation, innovation and public engagement, adding that AI was increasingly being used to facilitate new forms of gender-based harm, including deepfake sexual imagery, AI-enabled impersonation and other forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) that disproportionately affected women and girls.
These harms, she said, posed growing challenges for legal systems and institutions not designed to respond to synthetic media, rapid digital dissemination or cross-platform abuse, adding that addressing these gaps required structured dialogue among institutions responsible for prevention, enforcement and victim protection.
Stakeholder engagement
The stakeholder engagement, themed “Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence in the Age of Al: Legal and Policy Pathways for Ghana,” brought together law enforcement agencies, regulators, ministries and civil society organisations.
Presenting a research report on TFGBV, Professor Shazia Choudhry of the University of Oxford Faculty of Law, said 95 per cent of deepfake messages were pornographic, with 98 per cent affecting women.
She said that without intentional legal mechanisms, the practice would trickle down into the country’s educational system, as it already was in some advanced countries.
Also, she warned that failure to address the issue could reduce women’s participation in politics, media and civic spaces due to stigma and social repercussions.Aincre Maame-Fosua Evans, also of the University of Oxford Faculty of Law, presented research on TFGBV, focusing on deepfake and image-based sexual abuse, as well as doxxing, highlighting their harmful effects on women and children.
She said the hope was that, as Ghana develops its national strategy to address TFGBV, the workshop would help to more strongly incorporate those aspects into existing legislative efforts.
A representative of LAWA-Ghana, Fitnat Adjetey, in an address, said AI was used in homes, workplaces, schools, among others, adding that it holds enormous promise. But as with every tool that humanity has fashioned, it can be weaponised.
She added that AI was currently being weaponised against women and children with impunity, adding that deep fake videos, synthetic sexual images and online impersonation were not hypothetical acts, but were being visited upon women and children, professional students, mothers and community leaders, adding that the damage was reputational, emotional, economic and in most cases irreversible.
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