Piece by piece, contre la peur
My first viral social media post happened about six or seven years ago, a few months after I had just introduced social media management into the newsroom where I worked at the time. The excitement was not necessarily because the post went viral, but because of what the content did to people. In it I saw the emotions it stirred and the ability of storytelling to quietly shape hearts and influence perspectives.
It is the same feeling I get today whenever someone speaks positively about our work at Paradigm Initiative (PIN). Funny enough, one recurring question during DRIF26 as with previous editions remained: “Is this the entire team?”
It has often felt like déjà vu. But at DRIF26, every time I heard the question, it carried with it a different kind of satisfaction, especially considering the deliberate effort over the past year to deepen engagement within Francophone Africa. Every interaction around our social media suddenly felt like proof that the work was travelling farther than we often realise behind our screens. Someone even asked me on Day One of the Forum whether I had been teasing the song the PIN team would dance to through my TikTok posts in the build-up to the Forum.
But before the dancing, the aesthetics, the trending hashtags and the polished big stage moments, there stood a massive boulder before us: team capacity. Almost every industry today is having conversations around burnout, capacity and overstretched teams. Civil society is no different. Thankfully, through initiatives like its Best Place to Work philosophy, Paradigm Initiative intentionally tries to maintain that balance between productivity and people. Still, many people remain fascinated when they see the size of the team and try to calculate output strictly by numbers. At some point during DRIF26, I genuinely wondered whether this would finally be the moment the string stretched too thin and broke.
I remember a member of the Ivorian belle famille joking about that universal feeling of wanting to run away the moment you wake up from bed and mentally scroll through your task list for the day. And trust me, the list was long. Social media updates, media coordination, press management, session publicity, interviews, content creation, last-minute adjustments, community engagement and sometimes, language interpreters.
The tasks ahead of us looked enormous. But like the proverbial elephant, the only way to eat it all was piece by piece and with a lot of our friends. Our colleagues at DRIF, volunteers, partners, participants and even random supporters in the hallway all became part of the machine that kept things moving. At some point, the challenge itself transformed into something beautiful: a public display of communal solidarity. Plus de peur que de mal.
What initially looked intimidating slowly became another reminder of what DRIF fundamentally represents: people coming together across sectors, countries and lived experiences to exchange ideas, discuss challenges and collectively outline solutions around digital rights and inclusion.
So to everyone who participated in sessions, granted interviews, helped coordinate activities, shared our content online or even simply smiled for the gram, you were part of the heavy lifting, and we genuinely cannot thank you enough. I honestly do not know if anyone summarised that feeling better than Young Jonn when he sang: “Big big things…”
If there is one lesson DRIF26 reinforced for me, it is that people are just as important as the mission itself. Helping hands almost always appear when the vision is clear and the purpose is understood and for us, they did appear.
Another important lesson from behind the scenes was the power of intentionality. Every successful outcome at DRIF26 was tied to deliberate thinking. What exactly were we trying to achieve? Why did it matter? And how could each activity contribute meaningfully to that larger goal?
Like every individual stitch carefully woven into my Toghu and every other fabric that graced the red carpet, intentionality creates beauty that cannot be ignored. From the Londa report launch to film screening, podcast conversations and various product unveilings, intentionality powered the Forum’s most memorable moments.
And while seeing the #DRIF26 hashtag trend number two on X was exciting, the true impact of the Forum goes far beyond social media metrics or fleeting online moments. It lives on in the conversations after sessions, in newly created email threads, in WhatsApp voice notes, in resulting collaborations, in the hearts and minds of journalists discovering digital rights conversations for the first time and hopefully, in the policies and future innovations. That, to me, is the real magic of DRIF26.
Giyo Ndzi is Communications Officer at Paradigm Initiative. This piece is part of his personal reflections and experiences from the 2026 Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF26) in Abidjan.
Missed Part I? Check it out here.