Gen Z and digital protests across Asia and Africa ^{CEFR B2}

Across Asia and Africa a rising wave of youth-led protests is reshaping how people mobilise. Young activists, often called Gen Z, organise rapidly and in decentralised ways using digital platforms and encrypted tools. Their core demands focus on transparency, merit-based governance and basic services, and they increasingly ask to co-create solutions while asserting autonomy.

Nepal provides a recent case study. From April 2025 Nepali youths shared memes and criticised government corruption; by September 2025 TikTok reels and Discord threads had become street marches. Authorities tried social media bans, but the movement moved through encrypted servers and proxy networks. Within thirty hours of the first online call to protest the elected government had fallen after thousands of micro-actions. Young people kept debating a so-called Gen-Z Mandate online and in cafés. Elections were announced for March 2026, and the government later appointed grassroots digital activist Mahabir Pun as Minister for Education, Science, and Technology; Pun had won the Ramon Magsaysay award in 2007 for his work on internet access in rural Nepal.

The EU System for an Enabling Environment for Civil Society (EU SEE) documents wider regional pressures: surveillance and legal scrutiny of CSOs in India; continued fragility in Sri Lanka after President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled in 2022; bureaucratic limits on civil society in Bhutan; mass convictions of opposition supporters in Pakistan; and a critical situation in Myanmar, where the military junta halted NGO distribution of HIV, malaria and tuberculosis medications while travel bans and transport restrictions increased.

Other recent episodes include Sri Lanka’s decentralised, digitally enabled 2022 Aragalaya; Madagascar’s unrest beginning on September 25, 2025, when students in Antananarivo protested blackouts and water cuts and demonstrations spread to Diego, Toamasina and Mahajanga, after which security forces used tear gas, rubber bullets and automatic rifle fire (AK-47 type) and by October 13 the president fled and Parliament was dissolved. Similar sparks appeared in Indonesia (#IndonesiaGelap), Bangladesh, and the Philippines, where exposure of “ghost” projects led to mass demonstrations and hundreds of arrests, including minors, and detainees organised the Alliance Against Corruption and Police Brutality.

These cases show how digital networks can offer support, legal aid and emotional backup, change public stigma around protest, and create new political pressures and risks for civil society.