Grants Awarded

Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

A grant of £14,920 to Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to help them build, develop and deploy the SMS referral system to improve uptake of sexual and reproductive healthcare in Mwanza, Tanzania. If you’d like to learn more about how the system works and the role it plays in LSTM’s larger clinical study, click here.

Sciences Po

A grant of up to £10,000 to Sciences Po to pay for the flights and accommodation costs of representatives of African organisations with an interest in parliamentary informatics to attend a two-day conference on Open Legislative Data. For more on this grant, click here.

Africa Gathering

A grant of £15,000 to cover the flight and accommodation costs of several innovation hubs to attend Africa Gathering’s London 2012 conference. The conference aims to bring together businesses, investors and funders with an interest in the African tech scene and start-ups. To read more about this grant, click here.

Youth Agenda

A grant of £10,000 to Kenyan NGO, Youth Agenda, to help develop an SMS system of Leadership Vetting & Selection. The idea is to encourage Kenyans to reflect on what makes a good leader and to be able to identify those characteristics in political candidates. Youth Agenda aim to work with more than 10,000 young Kenyans to raise awareness of leadership skills and to start a debate on key political issues affecting the country. You can find more information here.

RLabs

A grant totalling £22,200 to support the establishment of a Social Enterprise Innovation Incubator and Accelerator in South Africa and an innovation hub in Somaliland. The grants will cover costs associated with set-up of the spaces, such as equipment, training and capacity building. More information about the South Africa incubator can be found here, while this page has more on the Somaliland hub.

iCow

A grant for £15,000 to cover salary and legal costs, as well as any related costs iCow incur as they move to expand their service across Kenya. We have funded iCow on a couple of occasions in the past, but to read more about this grant click here.

KINU

A £30,000 grant to the KINU Group who are establishing an innovation hub in Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam. The grant will be used to cover things such as rent, salaries and fit-out costs of what will be ‘an open space for Tanzania’s tech community to foster co-creation, innovation and capacity building’. Read more here.

Amnesty International

A grant of £16,000 to help Amnesty International UK and Amnesty International Kenya build a mapping website that will capture information about forced evictions of slum residents in Nairobi. It will be the first platform of its kind in Kenya and it’s hoped that the information collected will allow Amnesty to get a clearer overview of the scale of the problem and provide a compelling tool with which to lobby the Kenyan Government. More information can be found here.

Young Rewired State

A grant of £10,000 to the British organisation Young Rewired State (YRS). YRS is a network of developers aged 18 and under who have an aptitude for coding or designing for the internet. Our grant will be used to support various aspects of the nationwide hack week, organised each year by YRS to foster and encourage Britain’s young developers. Read more in this blog post.

HiveColab

A grant of £18,000 to HiveColab, a co-working space in Uganda. The Hive are now looking to move to new premises where they will be able to continue their work and this grant will be used to help pay rent and fit-out costs of the new space. Part of the grant will also go towards supporting the salary costs of their community manager. Read more here.

SODNET

A grant of £30,750 to go towards the salary costs of employing an Infonet Development Programme Lead and a Programmer. Both of these posts will allow SODNET to develop the Infonet programme – to expand its reach and improve its efficiency. For more information, click here.

Africa Gathering

A grant of up to £5,000 to assist Africa Gathering to organise up to two events in Africa. The events aim to bring together innovative thinkers and doers with a passion for Africa. The first event, which will be moderated by Indigo Trust Executive, Loren Treisman, will be held in Uganda at the end of January 2012. For more information on this grant, click here.

iWatchLive

A grant of £5,000 to iWatchLive, a web application that not only allows citizens to access Nigerian government budget data, but also allows them to report back on incidences of corruption and poor service delivery, thereby highlighting the areas in which government is failing to live up to its promises. More information can be found here.

BongoHive

We have awarded a grant of $19,600 to BongoHive, a Zambian tech hub, which takes its inspiration from similar facilities in Kenya, Uganda, Senegal and Cameroon. The grant will cover the costs of a mobile/web app competition, a mobile app training course and internet and modem costs. Click here for more information.

SHM Foundation

Indigo is delighted to announce a grant of £15,000 to the SHM Foundation to scale-up Project Kopano. Based in Pretoria, Kopano is a project that creates mutual support networks that use SMS to connect HIV+ mothers to one another, enabling them to share experiences, fears and doubts and to ask questions of the health professionals or mentors that are on hand to provide expert advice and reassurance. For more, click here.

TEDX Dzorwulu

We have awarded TEDxDzorwulu a grant of £4,000 towards the costs of organising a conference. The event aims to foster and develop Ghana’s growing tech community and will take place in Accra, Ghana on 10 December 2011. To read more, click here.

IADP

Indigo has awarded a grant of £10,000 towards their Affordable Access Programme. The grant will be used to enable IADP and its partner universities to identify collections of relevant and affordable eBook titles in support of the Open University’s TESSA (Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa) and HEAT (Health Education and Training) projects. You can find more about this project here.

Co-Creation Hub

Indigo has awarded a grant totalling £25,000 to the Co-Creation Hub in Nigeria. £10,000 of this covers salary costs for a business adviser to provide support to several of the very promising projects that are emerging from the hub. The remaining £15,000 was divided equally between three projects that started out life in the hub. More information on those projects can be found here.

Wikimedia

Indigo has awarded a grant of £10,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia. The money will go toward upgrading Wikimedia’s mobile platform, which will enable Wikimedia to better reach the millions of people in the developing world and low-income communities everywhere, who access the Internet exclusively through mobile phones. More information can be found here.

iLab

Indigo has awarded a grant of £20,000 to iLab, a computer lab based in Monrovia that provides access to cutting edge technology, expert IT assistance and a community of like-minded individuals. The grant will be used for staffing costs, the upgrading of iLab’s internet connection and a small amount for office supply and equipment costs. To read more, click here.

ActionAid

Indigo has awarded ActionAid a grant of £10,000 in support of a project to map incidents of land grabbing in rural Tanzania. The project will allow citizens to report incidents of land grabbing and provide them with support to assert their rights and raise the profile of this important issue. More information can be found here.

Co-Creation Hub – Nigerian Constitution App

A grant of £7,000 has been awarded to the Cocreation hub to support Zubair Abubakar in developing his already successful Blackberry Nigerian Consitution App for use on other platforms. Find out more about this project here.

Youth for Tech

Indigo has awarded a grant of £10,000 to Youth for Tech for peer-to-peer sexual health counselling in the southeastern and Niger Delta regions of Nigeria. The RLabs Nigeria project is a partnership between Youth for Technology Foundation and Rlabs and will involve training up 50 at-risk youth in the use of ‘social media platforms and mobile technology to write about their own personal experiences’ and to work as health counsellors ‘responsible for providing sex education to other youth in the community’. Read more about this project here.

Mobile Consortium Ghana

Indigo has awarded a grant of £10,000 to Mobile Consortium Ghana to help with the costs of organising the Mobile App Ghana Showcase. Awards have been made in three categories (governance, health and education), with runners up receiving money to invest in new mobile technologies to help them continue their promising work. To read more about this grant, click here.

Question Box/Open Mind

The Indigo team has awarded a grant of £10,000 to Open Mind’s Open Question project. The grant will be used to cover the salary costs of two developers working on software which will enable any community organisation to set up their own hotline. Read more about this project here.

ActivSpaces

Indigo has awarded a grant of £10,008.96 to help with ActivSpace’s running costs. The money will go towards the salary of a new community manager to guide ActivSpaces as it continues to grow, as well as covering the costs of much-needed hardware and software and promotional materials to help spread knowledge of ActivSpaces’s work. Further details on this grant can be found here.

Map Kibera Trust

The Indigo Trust has awarded a grant of £11,320.32 to Map Kibera Trust to be match funded by the African Technology and Transparency Initiative. Part of the money will be used to increase the Trust’s community outreach work, while the remainder will be used to improve the impact of the web tools, primarily through the redevelopment of the Voice of Kibera website. More information can be found here.

FrontlineSMS Radio

The Indigo Trust has awarded a second grant of £10, 000 to FrontlineSMS Radio to provide further technical support and some equipment costs to radio stations involved in the pilot phase of this project. You can read more about this grant here or our previous grant to them here.

One World

Indigo has awarded One World a grant of £13,000 to help them establish a Facebook page linking young Nigerians and Senegalese to trained, experienced professionals who will be on hand to answer any questions about sex, relationships and health. Further information can be found here.

Institute for Philanthropy

We’ve awarded a grant of £18, 600 to the Institute for Philanthropy for a paper designed to showcase how philanthropists can use Social Media effectively within their own organisations and how they can support grantees in doing so. Further details can be found here.

Mobile Active

Indigo has awarded a £20,000 grant to Mobile Active. Half of the grant will be used to produce a research paper entitled ‘State of Mobiles in Human Rights, Democracy & Governance’ and the other half will contribute towards costs for running an (un)conference around similar themes. Further details can be found here.

mySociety

We have awarded a grant of £40,000 to mySociety to help with a new project aimed at enhancing the ability of NGOs, individuals and campaigners to replicate some of mySociety’s most successful projects in their own countries. Open Society Institute are co-funding this work. Further details can be found here.

Co-Creation Hub

We have awarded a grant of £10,000 to the Co-Creation Hub in Nigeria. The money will be used to help cover the Hub’s core costs. For more on this grant, please read this press release prepared in conjunction with the Omidyar Network.

Tactical Technology

We have awarded a grant of £16, 350 to Tactical Tech. £11, 350 will contribute towards for a project working with human rights activists around the developing world in order to support them to make more effective use of technology in their work. £5000 will fund workshops of their choice. To find out more, read our blog post here.

iCow

The Indigo Trust have made a grant of £14,536 to iCow to cover the costs of a customer service centre to handle support and feedback from the iCow users. iCow is a mobile application which acts as a virtual vet for small-scale dairy farmers, providing them with critical information to ensure that their cattle remain healthy during pregnancy. Further details can be found here.

Transparency and Accountability Initiative

We have awarded a grant of £10, 000 to the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, New Technologies Subgroup, of which The Indigo Trust is an associate member. The initiative brings together like-minded donors to encourage more strategic thinking, policy change and shared learning in the field of transparency and accountability in order to maximise impact at scale. Further details on the collaborative can be found here.

Institute for Philanthropy

We have awarded a grant of £41,506.40 to The Institute for Philanthropy who will be managing the logistical side of a conference which Indigo Trust will be co-hosting alongside The Omidyar Network. Further details on the conference, entitled IT, Philanthropy and Development, which is aimed at an audience of philanthropists can be found here.

Tech-In Series/Co-Creation Hub

The Indigo Trust have awarded a grant of £5,000 to the Co-Creation Hub team to cover prize money and some project management costs for a Tech-in Governance ‘Living Lab’ event in Lagos. Find out more about this event and the team behind it on this blog post.

Hive Colab

The Indigo Trust has awarded a grant of £10, 000 to the Hive Colab in Uganda for general operational costs. The Colab is an open, collaborative, community owned, work environment for young tech entrepreneurs to focus on projects, access the internet, have a quiet professional environment to develop their ideas in, hold events and generally collaborate. To find out more, read this blog post.

Pamoja FM

The Indigo Trust has awarded Pamoja FM a grant of £2213 to cover equipment costs, which will enhance their ability to work effectively with FrontlineSMS Radio to enable two-way communication with their listeners, bringing critical information to citizens of Kibera slum in Nairobi. For more information, please refer to this blog post.

FrontlineSMS Radio

The Indigo Trust has awarded FrontlineSMS Radio with a £10, 200 grant to fund a part-time Project Manager to coordinate between the developer team, researchers, partners and users on the ground. See our blog post for more detail about the project. It is hoped that this project will contribute to stimulating civil activism and have implications for bottom-up governance. We look forward to working with Sharath, Ken, Laura and the wider FrontlineSMS community.

Africa Gathering

The Indigo Trust has awarded a grant of £10, 000 to Africa Gathering (£5000 towards ICT4D conference costs and £5000 for business support). It is hoped that this grant will assist Africa Gathering in achieving sustainability and will ensure that innovative projects around Africa are recognised and supported by the international community. For further details about this organisation, please refer to our blog post.