The Africa Online Safety Fund (AOSF) has announced the winners of this year’s grants, among them six organisations operating in Nigeria: Access Drive Capacity Development Foundation, Epower, Lagos Mums Foundation, TechSocietal, Teens Can Code, and Zikoko Citizen.
The selection of the 22 winning organisations from seven countries was announced by Impact Amplifier (IA) from its headquarters in Cape Town, South Africa.
Nigeria had the highest number of awards. It was followed by South Africa, five, and Ghana and Kenya, four. Cameroon, Somalia, and Zimbabwe each had one winner. Although the winning organisations reflect seven countries, their internet safety interventions span across 15 African countries in total.
Just over 350 applications were received in the 2023 cohort, from which a shortlist of 40 entries made it for the final selection process. Each of the eventual winners will receive grants ranging from $10,000 to $50,000, made possible with the support of Google.org.
Making the announcement, Impact Amplifier Director, Tanner Methvin said, “With over 500 million people having access to the internet in Africa, reflecting just under 40 percent of the continent’s population, online safety issues are of critical concern.”
The AOSF, Methvin said, supports innovative approaches to addressing the complex safety issues the internet presents. “The winning innovative solutions range from unique ways of combating misinformation and disinformation, establishing investigative teams to track cyber criminals, supporting journalists targeted with hate speech and bullying, integrating online safety training into school curricula, and much more.”
The AOSF offers grants to organisations throughout Africa that address one or more of the safety issues the internet facilitates. It is, however, focused on four primary countries: Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa, in this funding round.
There are three categories of funding: transformative, maturing, and catalytic. Transformative projects are intended to be larger in scale, reach multiple geographies and/or potentially large numbers of beneficiaries, and be scalable as a solution. The maturing projects are intended to test ideas on a larger scale, try new ideas within existing projects, and reach new audiences. The catalytic projects are intended to be smaller, targeted, and potentially only locally or culturally specific.
Transformative projects are eligible for a maximum grant of $50,000; maturing projects up to $25,000; and catalytic projects up to $10,000.
In addition to announcing the winners of the AOSF awards, Impact Amplifier, again with the support of Google.org, is developing the first Africa-focused online safety research, education, and support platform. Since 2021, Impact Amplifier has realized that the only way to combat the scale of this challenge is by creating an ecosystem approach. Part of developing this ecosystem involves centralising some of the key tools needed for support.
To this end, it is developing an online platform that aggregates all the research that has been done regarding online safety in Africa, making this key knowledge available to policymakers, civil society, academics, businesses, and the general public. Additionally, the platform will host educational materials to teach children and adults alike how to protect themselves online. This content will include curriculum, testing materials, evaluation tools, and general awareness content, enabling anyone interested in learning how to protect themselves or others to have easy access to all the content they need. Finally, despite our best protection efforts, online violations occur. Once someone has been the victim of an online crime or violation, getting help is hard. To address this, the platform will centralise all the ways that people can seek support, no matter where they are in Africa. This new platform will be launched in February 2024.