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We offer country-specific examples of how these projects and processes work. We analyse recent trends by presenting several cases of how social media are changing the work of foreign development assistance, the practice of democracy, and the methods of anti-democratic regime control. In other countries, usually where regimes have made negligible investments in public information infrastructure, digital media have become powerful tools for social control. In some sub-Saharan African countries, social media have greatly improved users’ access to culture, engagement with politics, and access to economic opportunity. Social media, like many other communication technologies, have varying uses across the domains of human development. While the private appropriation of digital media technologies by individuals in Africa is interlaced with contextual nuances and peculiarities, this opens up new possibilities for understanding the private as political, and for the popular to have serious public implications. Overall, these technologies – among other more formal processes such as education and legislation – expand the range of processes which advance women’s emancipation. While the mobile phone and Internet amplify the importance of identity construction and the psychological need by young women to formulate an empowering sense of self, there is a dialectical tension between the need for women’s autonomy from disempowering social processes vis-à-vis conformity to social hierarchy. But how is this possible, when the attributes of mobile phones (mobility, connectivity, sociability) contradict the socialisation of women, particularly in Africa, where a ‘desirable’ femininity entails withdrawal from public spaces, shyness and being mostly confined to domestic settings? Using domestication theory, this study explores these questions through in-depth interviews with young female and male students in three higher learning institutions in Harare. In feminist literature, there is a sense that the mobile phone amplifies women’s voices in a public sphere crowded by male domination.