The Africa Online Safety Platform: a centralised online repository about online safety
Key points
The Africa Online Safety Platform (AOSP) is a free of charge, centralised online repository of information about online safety, consisting of:
- Online safety research: reports, journal articles, news articles and books
- Education content: open-source online safety educational materials catering to teachers, parents and students of all ages
- Funding opportunities: access to available funding opportunities for research and innovation
- Getting help: Africa-focused, country-level legal frameworks; international agreements, and relevant law enforcement agencies and reporting avenues; and social media platform support information
The problem
Over 520 million people in Africa, or 40% of the population, now have internet access, significantly boosting socio-economic opportunities and potentially contributing $180 billion to the African economy by 2025.
However, this rapid growth also brings challenges, with particularly dire effects on the most vulnerable groups: women and children. These include privacy and security concerns, fake news, political manipulation, and cyber threats like child exploitation and financial scams.
Africa’s outdated ICT infrastructure significantly exacerbates these issues. In addition, policymakers have not prioritised cybersecurity, with only 15% of African countries having clear legal frameworks and enforcement for cybercrimes. Consequently, Africa is vulnerable to internet-related threats, with 80% of African nations ranking low on the Global Cybersecurity Index.
The solution
Supported by Google.org and developed by Impact Amplifier Foundation, the Africa Online Safety Platform empowers educators, parents, academics, policy makers, civil society and the private sector to navigate the complexities of online safety across the continent.
It aggregates African research, provides a library of educational content, funding opportunities for internet safety innovators, and ways to get help if an online harm has occurred.
Together with the Africa Online Safety Fund, the Africa Online Safety Platform has made progress by funding innovators, aggregating research, and providing educational resources.
Over the next two years, the strategy will focus on five areas:
- Research: develop frameworks, commission studies, and leverage AI for analysis
- Education: customise materials, develop new resources, and translate them into key languages
- Legal: map systems, and assess effectiveness, trail new models for enhancement, and replicate successful models
- Replication Intervention Models: identify and support best practices online safety solutions to replicate and scale
- Audience Development: launch PR campaigns, enhance SEO, and collaborate with safety networks to grow the use and functionality of the AOSP
These efforts aim to create a sustainable solution to online safety issues in Africa.
The Impact Amplifier Foundation seeks partners and contributors to join in building a new online safety ecosystem in Africa. Please get in touch at info@africaonlinesafety.com.
The impact
The Africa Online Safety Fund (AOSF) is an initiative of Impact Amplifier Foundation that aims to address the pressing and widespread issue of online safety in Africa. In phase one alone, the AOSF achieved the following:
Funding:
- 46 organisations funded
- Spread across 9 African countries
- Projects extended to 20 countries
Reach:
- 14 million Africans reached
- Thorough research on online hazards
- Access to educational program tools or platforms
- Direct virtual and in-person trainings
- Traditional and digital media campaigns
Training:
- 63,000 people trained
- 32,000 children (ages 6 to 18)
- 9,000 teachers
- 23,000 adults
- 5,000 trainers trained, who then trained other teachers, parents, and children
AOSP marks the launch of the first African Online Safety research database which aggregates all Africa-focused online safety research, and is constantly expanding to be the most comprehensive research database available.
Since launching in February 2024, the platform has maintained an average of 3.7K sessions, a 38.9% engagement rate, and accumulated 21.8K events, fuelled by diverse traffic sources including direct, referral, organic social, and email.
Since the launch of the Facebook campaign, the AOS platform reached 47.5k people across Africa.
AOSP is successfully:
- Funding over 46 African online safety organisations to directly address online safety issues across the continent.
- Educating AOS grantees, assisting in the capacity development of online safety innovators
- Providing best-practice educational content and training tools for teachers, parents, and individuals of all ages
- Developing a database of over 700 African online safety organisations
- Providing support and guidance through the Getting Help website function for victims of online crimes across 54 African countries
- Bringing together experts to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse online
Lessons learned
Online safety in Africa requires an ecosystem approach.
Internet usage creates a broad spectrum of safety issues including gender based violence, bullying, extremist recruitment, fraud and more. To successfully address these issues requires on-going research to understand the scope and scale of the challenges, a legal framework and enforcement system that works and large scale efforts to educate users on how to keep themselves safe. To achieve this requires the public and private sector, and civil society to work collaboratively and to find new stakeholders to join these efforts.
The importance of ensuring that the platform was built on a scalable architecture to handle the increasing data being housed on the site.
Knowledge gaps are continuously being explored and new content (educational and research materials) is being added. It is vital to ensure that these updates are able to occur seamlessly.
Realising the importance of a user friendly filtering/search function.
As the database has over 280 research papers and over 240 educational materials, ensuring users can efficiently search for what they are looking for is essential. To this end, we have tagged all content (category/theme of online issue, geographical location etc) for optimal indexing and searching.
Feedback for continuous improvement
We have realised the need for focus groups and feedback sessions with individuals across the platform’s main audiences. These would take place after they have explored the platform.
For more information, please visit: https://www.africaonlinesafety.com/ or contact info@africaonlinesafety.com
About Impact Amplifier Foundation
The Impact Amplifier Foundation’s mission is to harness the transformative potential of digital technology to advance social and economic development, foster educational opportunities, and facilitate safe and responsible communication throughout Africa.
A core aspect of Impact Amplifier Foundation’s mission is the proactive mitigation of online safety challenges prevalent across the continent through the Africa Online Safety Platform (AOSP) and the Africa Online Safety Fund with partners across Africa. Their objective is to create a robust ecosystem of cross-sectoral stakeholders that share and co-create knowledge and best practices, and engage communities to ensure safety online.