Africa's Voices Foundation Limited

Company description

Africa's Voices Foundation is a UK-registered charity that seeks to empower citizens to participate in decision-making that affects them through sustained, inclusive, and plural dialogue between citizens and authorities. They achieve this by deploying their interactive radio method involving decision-makers, shaped by audience input, to create meaningful spaces for public dialogue.

Africa's Voices Foundation amplifies citizen voices to influence decision-making in Africa.

Africa's Voices Foundation is a citizen engagement and social data analytics organisation that enables charitable organisations, governance actors and non-charitable organisations pursuing charitable purposes to better understand beneficiary populations needs, feedback on ongoing activities and evaluate interventions. It's primary focus is on deploying a platform for interactive local language radio programmes that invite audience feedback. It also works with digital social media platforms. Africa's Voices Foundation has an expertise in analysing large volumes of unstructured digital social data in African languages. It's initial focus of work is East Africa, where it has established a branch office. Africa's Voices Foundation Ltd is a company limited by guarantee and a registered UK Charity (1159589). In 2015, Africa's Voices secured major multi-year grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the David and Elaine Potter Foundation to carry through its start-up phase in East Africa.

Project impact

Africa's Voices enabled Emmy-Award winning Well Told Story to track the impact of its communications for development work (notably Gates-funded contraception work) among Kenyan youth, on changing the conversation young people are having. This enabled them to enhance targeted messaging in their work to reach specific segments of their audience identified during our work. Africa's Voices has worked with UNICEF Somalia since 2015, currently deploying a multi-sector Communication for Development programme using interactive radio shows on 27 stations across the country to gain evidence from hard-to-reach populations to guide programming and to evaluate interventions. This pioneering work was recognised by the Market Research Society, which awarded Africa's Voices Foundation the 2016 President's Medal for extraordinary contributions to research. During the 2017 drought, UNICEF has reached out to Africa's Voices to deploy rapid remote monitoring capabilities. Africa's Voices has also worked with Oxfam in Kenya on opinions towards extractive industries amongst marginalised communities in the north-west, and on attitudes towards tax justice, with its insights shaping new interventions in Kenya and other countries where Oxfam operates on this theme.