Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) is aimed at strengthening protections for human rights defenders (HRDs), with a focus on women’s rights, in digital spaces through policy advocacy & digital security awareness-raising. The foundation, founded by Nighat Dad, is an advocacy organization that helps women escape honor killings, online violence and to fix negative online images of them.
The foundation has been working hard to protect women rights online and has recently been one of the Forbes’ top 10 entrepreneurs to receive accolade at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) summit in New York on Monday.
Forbes selected their top 10 entrepreneurs through their presentations at the UN Solutions Summit that was hosted on the sidelines of the UNGA. Launched in 2015 the summit “showcases entrepreneurial solutions helping to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s).”
Nighat Dad, is a lawyer by profession, who set up DRF in 2012. She was selected by UN as one of the 10 solution makers who turned local action into global ambition.
DRF also campaigns against legislations giving government bodies sweeping powers of surveillance online, dissemination of personal information of customers collected by telecom companies to government agencies and other organizations.
Furthermore, Nighat Dad is also the recipient of the Dutch government’s 2016 Human Rights Tulip award, which will be presented to her on the upcoming Human Rights Day in December in The Hague. Time magazine has also picked her in its “Next Generation Leaders” in 2015.
