The Data Empowerment Fund is delighted to announce its support to eight initiatives driving greater individual agency and community control over data.
Located across the globe, these eight initiatives address some of the world’s most pressing challenges, including ensuring fair work, tackling the climate crisis, and governing artificial intelligence.
The initiatives take different approaches to data empowerment, reflecting the causes they’ve been designed to address and the communities they work with and are driven by. Each is a demonstration of a future where people are more able to participate in the systems of data collection, use, and sharing that shape their lives.
The eight initiatives awarded granted by the Data Empowerment Fund are:
- Digital Aotearoa Collective: To develop new versions of the Pataka and Āhau applications and teach users how to use them and how they work. Pataka was designed and developed by indigenous community developers for indigenous communities to enable the recording and sharing of information, while maintaining their data sovereignty.
- Hush Line: To launch and develop new features for the open-source whistleblowing platform, which is designed to make it easier, safer, and more successful for people to share sensitive information without compromising their identity.
- Growing Turkopticon for the Fight Against Mass Rejections: To advance the worker-run, worker-led advocacy organization’s work to fight for better conditions for data workers around the world, including to escalate its campaign around mass rejections (when a requester posts work on a platform and then rejects all submissions from all workers without paying them).
- Community-based collection of linguistic resources for bias assessment in language technologies: To work with teachers and students to build a new dataset to document known stereotypes and biases in education and to develop methodologies and courses for evaluating stereotypes and discriminatory biases in natural language processing.
- Data4Mods: Content Moderators’ Collective Power through Data: To work with the African Content Moderators Union to develop a database of international companies outsourcing work to Kenya, document evidence of the working conditions experienced by these workers, and support moderators to decide together how to use the data to drive improvements.
- Content Moderators United for Data and Digital Rights: To work with the Nigerian content moderators and tech workers to register a trade union and deliver an educational campaign to boost awareness of data, digital, and mental health rights, provide training on privacy and data protection, and provide mental health outreach and litigation support to tech workers.
- Grassroots AI-supported news monitoring with human rights organizations: To extend collaborative data collection techniques developed to monitor news for femicide to other types of violations, such as murders of Indigenous land defenders and mass shootings. This process of assembling ‘counter-data’ is designed to fill gaps in public data monitoring, advocate for policy change, and help provide services to impacted communities.
- Ushahidi Climate Data Equity Initiative: To create a new tool to help users collect, manage, and make sense of climate data more effectively, as well develop a toolkit and webinar series to drive usage of the data. The Ushahidi Climate Data Equity ensures citizen voices are included in conversations around response, mitigation, and adaptation to the climate crisis.
Over the next nine months, the Data Empowerment Fund will work with these initiatives to support and amplify their work. Our Advisory Panel will engage with the group, sharing their experience and expertise. Later in the year, we will run an event to bring the initiatives and the wider Data Empowerment Fund community together.
The grantees were selected from more than 800+ applications from around the world. This level of interest in the Data Empowerment Fund reflects the urgent need for new approaches to data empowerment, as well as the scale of experimentation happening and demand for philanthropic support.
The process of running an open call and the time invested by those that submitted applications has generated an incredibly rich dataset. We’re conscious of its potential to shine a light into the field of data empowerment. While we’re unable to share the data in full, we will publish detailed analysis of the application data in the coming weeks. We’ll also be making further updates to the Data Empowerment Fund website to bring together more information and resources for those working on data empowerment initiatives.
“Data governance grounded exclusively in the frameworks of the past misses the opportunities of the future. The initiatives we’re celebrating today transform how communities take ownership of their data while addressing real and urgent problems. By driving bottom-up empowerment, they ensure that data serves people, fostering equity, resilience, and sustainable progress from the ground up. Their work fosters new hope, proving that grassroots innovation can lead to transformative change and a future where everyone has an ownership stake in the digital world.”
—Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation
“Right now, corporations control the majority of our data—stifling innovation and exacerbating privacy and security concerns. Omidyar Network is proud to support these eight initiatives, which will help to put data governance where it belongs: in the hands of individuals and their communities. Together, we’re building a better digital future, in which data is used to advance progress, better society, and tackle some of our most pressing global challenges.”
—Govind Shivkumar, Director, Responsible Technology at Omidyar Network
“These initiatives demonstrate how people and communities can take part – meaningfully and practically – in collecting, using and sharing data to address some of the most difficult challenges we face. I’m excited that the Data Empowerment Fund has been able to support their work and I look forward to working with and learning from the initiatives as they evolve.”
—Jack Hardinges, Fund Lead, Data Empowerment
For any enquiries about the Data Empowerment Fund or these initiatives, please contact [email protected].
