With over 4 billion people (71% of whom are 15-24 year olds) and 1 in 3 children with Internet access, children’s lives are being shaped behind a screen. Digital technology provides children and young people with wider access to information, culture, communication, and entertainment.
These remarkable advantages also bring dangers; these tools can potentially heighten children’s exposure to online risks and harms. Being online can also magnify traditional threats and harms that many children already face offline and can further increase vulnerabilities with online risks also present 24/7/365.
Additionally, as technologies shape children’s daily experiences, their information is gathered, monitored, combined, examined, and sometimes used for financial gain. One major risk children and youth experience relates to weakened data integrity, high levels of mis/disinformation and the limited understanding for media literacy among children and youth globally.
$100,000 Open Source Solution Grants
The UNICEF Venture Fund is looking to invest in Open Source frontier technology solutions that have the potential to create radical change for children. They offer $100,000 equity-free grants for early-stage, for-profit technology start-ups that can improve the lives of children focused on:
- Misinformation and Disinformation: Tools, platforms or games leveraging new technologies to verify information and combat misinformation and/or disinformation, or behavioral interventions to consistently inform young people.
- Data generation, collection and analysis: Novel approaches to compile and validate large amounts of training data, or create new data through field data collection, crowdsourcing, or social network platforms.
- Digital trust: Leveraging existing and new technologies to build digital trust or generating insights to assess and mitigate the threats and harms for children in digital environments.
UNICEF is particularly interested in organizations that have an open source prototype showing promising results. Female-founded startups are especially encouraged to apply.
Apply Now! Deadline is December 23, 2024
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