All three programs actively facilitate participation in relevant local, regional and global events for selected projects. Each program’s Awards package provides a unique opportunity for the organizations supported to be showcased at regional and global events, acknowledging their contributions to social and economic development for their communities, as well as their technical innovations.
Awards Ceremony
The Seed Alliance Awards Ceremony was organized from 2012 to 2015 as part of the main program of the annual global Internet Governance Forum (IGF), where the winners for the three regional programs got together, alongside each of the three the RIRs’ senior management, donors and sponsors and interested IGF participants.
- IGF 2012 – Baku, Azerbaijan, Oct 2012
- IGF 2013 – Bali, Indonesia, Oct 2013
- IGF 2014 – Istanbul, Turkey, Sep 2014
- IGF 2015 João Pessoa, Brazil, Oct 2015
Booths and Workshops at the IGF
The Seed Alliance facilitated an information booth during the IGFs in 2013, 2014 and 2015 and also organized workshops as part of the IGF agenda discuss how funding is a key element to support Internet Development through a multi-stakeholder approach.
Participation at Global and Regional Events
Recipients from all three programs received financial and/or logistic support to expand their network of contacts by attending conferences and events and build capacity. Over the last three years:
- FIRE Africa was represented at 10 events in 9 different economies
- FRIDA was represented at 7 events in 6 different economies
- ISIF ASIA was represented at 24 events in 15 different economies
ICTD 2015 – Singapore. Seed Alliance workshop “Helping ideas grow” – Recipients from FIRE, FRIDA and ISIF Asia and regional program coordinators
Online Networking
Online forums are important mechanisms to facilitate training, mentoring, networking and outreach. Through feedback it was found that creating a new space is less effective than strengthening existing spaces at the regional/program level, taking into account that language barriers and contextual differences which make it difficult to encourage communication across all three regions. The Seed Alliance initially planned to hire moderators for different thematic online forums to be moderated by current and former recipients of each regional program. However, the use of existing forums, mailing lists and contribution to blogs were selected as more relevant after surveying recipients.
Online Learning
FRIDA developed an online course for proposal development using LACNIC’s e-learning platform to support the development of Grant applications for 2014 with 180 participants and 2015 with 122 participants registered to start the course and a completion rate of 30%.
Thanks to the support from the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network, ISIF Asia was able to identify JFDI.Asia – a Singapore-based seed accelerator – as a partner to provide an online space for funding recipients to approach the concepts around business development on a pre-acceleration, 21-day online course. Three courses were run during 2015 with 60 project teams benefiting from the opportunity to explore possibilities for business skills development applicable for their organization in their quest for sustainability. JFDI.Asia also offers a full acceleration program, and ISIF Asia is working to define a partnership so that selected funding recipients can benefit from their mentoring services as well as access their network of investors for the 2016-2017 period.
ISIF Asia Blog
In February 2014, ISIF Asia designed and launched the discover.isif.asia blog to help identify innovative solutions for Internet development. It continues to grow with weekly posts posted online as well as distributed to the email database of registered subscribers.