Google offers $5.8 million Grant to Support non-profit organizations in Africa
Google is making $40 million in grants in the areas of education, technology for social good, and modern day slavery to support non-profit Organizations. 11 of the selected grantee organizations, doing valuable work in Africa, will receive grants worth over $5.8 million.
The sectors to benefit from the grant include, Girl education, Empowerment through technology, Fighting slavery and human trafficking.
Girls’ education
Programs that focus on girls’ education in the developing world are supported. It’s a simple but remarkably powerful fact: give a girl an education and you’ll improve the chances of lifelong success not only for her, but also for her entire family and community. This is powerfully shown by the 10×10 film project, whose Google grant will help feature stories of girls from Egypt, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone.
The African Leadership Academy, based in South Africa, is educating a new generation of African leaders by providing merit scholarships to promising young women across the continent. Akili Dada, based in Kenya, also supports young female leaders through education, mentoring and leadership training. Grant to Camfed will provide 2,500 girls with a year of secondary education in rural Tanzania. Meanwhile, Omega Schools Foundation in Sierra Leone are creating new schools in Freetown and will enable girls from the poorest families to attend them. Together with the Google grants in other countries, groups like these will use Google’s funds to educate more than 10,000 girls in developing countries.
Grants for Africa
Empowerment through technology
The grantees in this category are using social media, open source programming and other technology platforms to connect communities, improve access to information and solve stubborn problems. Switchboard, for example, is already working with local mobile providers to help health care workers create networks and communicate for free in Liberia and Ghana, and is now expanding to serve 44 million people across Tanzania. iLab Liberia is creating a web development curriculum for high school students, and upgrading their lab’s VSAT connections so that they can teach technology classes together with Noble Peace Prize winner Leyma Gbowee. Samasource provides computer-based microwork opportunities for women, youth and refugees in Cameroon, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa.
Engineers without Borders Canada is developing rural infrastructure in Ghana and Malawi, whilst Inveneo will be sending a team of experts to spearhead rural broadband initiatives in multiple African countries, focusing initially in East Africa. Last but not least, Vittana helps lenders offer loans to worthy students in Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda.
Fighting slavery and human trafficking
Slavery is a multi-billion dollar industry that impacts more than 27 million people; Google want to highlight this urgent issue and do its part to combat it by funding a range of groups that are collaborating to tackle the problem from all sides. For instance, in India, International Justice Mission (IJM), along with The BBC World Service Trust, Action Aid and Aide et Action, are forming a new coalition that works on the ground with local governments to stop bonded labor by identifying slave owners, documenting abuses, freeing individuals and families and providing them with rehabilitation and job training.
To learn more about these organizations and how you can get involved, visit our Google Gives Back 2011 site.
These initiatives were only part of Google’s annual philanthropic efforts. Over the course of the year, Google provided more than $115 million in funding to various nonprofit organizations and academic institutions around the world; in-kind support (programs like Google Grants and Google Apps for Education that offer free products and services to eligible organizations) totaled over a billion dollars, and the annual company-wide GoogleServe event and related programs enabled individual Googlers to donate more than 40,000 hours of their own volunteer time.