Heldôfbylding

Nourishing

Nourishing our relationships with local and regional movements in East and Southern Africa

Aug. 7, 2024
Mozilla

Skreaun troch Mozilla

The African continent plays a central role in our shared history and yet has too often been idolized, exoticised, over-simplified, and commercialized. But Africa’s tech communities and movements have long been fighting hard for their rightful place at the forefront of technological innovation, digital rights progress, and AI history.

At Mozilla, when we look at the region, we see distinct communities, language groups, needs and histories. But we also see interconnected movements and shared agendas.

This is why the last year has been an extremely important time for Mozilla’s work in East and Southern Africa. The movement-building work initiated through Africa Innovation Mradi continued to be refined and strengthened, with increased engagement from across the region visible through various Mozilla funding streams. With this program, we aim to create pathways for meaningful national and regionally cohesive work, through investment in the ecosystem.

We listened to movements and were led by African expertise, both from within our staff as well as from among our fellows and awardees; we experimented with different grantmaking and convening tools; we integrated our regional work under one banner. And in 2023, we saw that when African tech communities come together, our futures seem more assured.

That’s why, in 2023 -

  • We brought MozFest House not just to Amsterdam but to Nairobi. MozFest House Kenya brought together African innovators, activists and movement-leaders to explore issues critical to the safe, ethical design and deployment of AI across the region, and was an embodiment of Africa Innovation Mradi’s convening strategy;

  • To identify and support new technologies by African innovators, we significantly increased our grantmaking in the region - funding twice as many projects in 2023 when compared to the previous year - and learned how to implement our work through exploratory grantmaking approaches driven by local needs, to support local voices and entrepreneurs, and to solve local problems.

  • We integrated the Africa Innovation Mradi lens across our other funding streams, such as Creative Media Awards, where artists from Uganda and Zimbabwe are taking on difficult questions about equality, ethics and AI design, and Responsible Computing Challenge, where awardees from the region are working to embed ethics into computer science education on the continent;

  • We sponsored seven regional events which convened technical communities and amplified the diverse voices of civil society: these included COMPASS (the ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies), the Africa Media Festival, Civic Tech Innovation Forum (CTIF) and Deep Learning Indaba. These events held by and for local communities are essential for shifting the public and policy narrative towards trustworthy AI in ways that reflect the perspectives, experiences, and needs of Africans.

SEE Africa created a user-friendly, voice-enabled, accessible app, “Kiazi Bora,” (“quality potatoes” in Kiswahili) that gives women in rural areas farming tips, market availability data, and nutritional information about Orange-fleshed sweet potatoes (OFSPs). OFSPs are an overlooked crop with the potential to become a staple source of nutrition and income for rural households, of which women are the bedrock workers.

Nourishing our alumni community

We were able to bring Mozilla’s first-ever Mozilla Fellowships & Awards Alumni Program to fruition last year, which provides the infrastructure and the resources needed to enable community and connection, and support creativity and collaboration among our alumni.

This represents an important step taken by Mozilla to nourish and sustain existing relationships and networks, and it illustrates our commitment to continuing to feed the connections we have built over the years.

The Alumni Program embodies our movement-building ethos and is built on years of shared learning around what it takes to sustain a global network of leaders. It is our ambition to connect and support a network of over 700 illustrious Mozilla alumni.

That’s why, in 2023 -

  • We designed and launched our first-ever grantmaking mechanism dedicated to alumni: our Alumni Connections grants, which, like its name implies, encourages alumni to explore connections to each others’ work and find pathways for collaboration, exemplifying Mozilla’s core values;
  • We received over 40 applications, which represented a diversity of geographies, a diversity of Mozilla programs, and a range of years of participation from 2012-2022;
  • We awarded grants to 13 projects led by Mozilla Alumni, totaling $175,000 in awards;
  • The projects funded build on existing work, as well as explore new work together. What did these proposals all have in common? They stemmed from a desire to bring other alumni into the work - guided by principles of openness and learning together.

Building on her work as a Mozilla Open Web Fellow in 2019, Petra Molnar received an Alumni Community Building Award to convene a learning circle including those in the Mozilla community and the inaugural refugee fellows at the Migration and Technology Monitor to foster connections and idea exchanges from the ground up on border technologies that impact every aspect of migration. This will facilitate an opportunity for people with lived experiences of migration to lead accessible and public-facing conversations interrogating both the negative impacts of technology as well as the creative solutions that innovation can bring to the complex stories of human movement.

Nourishing relationships within our philanthropic community through openness and knowledge-sharing

Among the tasks we set for ourselves, a high priority is our responsibility to bring along other philanthropic actors to move the needle. Part of our mission is to catalyze our peers and allies in our philanthropic community to help shape AI for the public good, towards accountability, transparency and agency.

In true open-source fashion, we prioritize sharing our knowledge and the insight we’ve gleaned from our work, enabling us to finetune our own strategies, spark conversation, and be in community with others.

That’s why, in 2023 -

  • We published our AI Funding Principles — 10 principles that sum up the institutional lessons we’ve learned from five years and $75 million of trustworthy AI grantmaking around the globe;
  • We co-published a report with GIZ detailing key learnings from our Common Voice partnership. Titled “Creating community-driven datasets: Insights from Mozilla Common Voice activities in East Africa,” the report summarizes lessons learned and strategies that three voice communities used to create publicly available datasets;
  • We shared reflections on the learnings and impacts from the first cohort of fellows and host organizations in Mozilla’s Tech + Society Fellows as we were preparing to launch recruitment for a second cohort;
  • We initiated a retrospective of Mozilla’s Creative Media Awards program. Through this work, we are examining how the CMAs can be improved, in particular, with the aim of connecting the dots between individual projects to create more cohesion to grow our movement’s collective power and more pathways for collective impact.

We collaborated with MozFest to host a Funders Track, which is a curated multi-panel experience designed with and for the global philanthropic community. The curated sessions aim to harness the collective power of philanthropy to fuel a movement for positive human and digital rights progress, and the actualization of trustworthy AI.

Mozilla Senior Vice President of Global Programs, J Bob Alotta, was featured in an episode of the Why Philanthropy Matters podcast Philanthopisms talking about what is happening at the intersection of artificial intelligence, philanthropy and civil society, and the approaches Mozilla is taking in its funding practices to ensure that AI is developed in a way that benefits society.

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