4. ACOPEA objectives
Promote Africa-wide education and awareness on the importance of
child online safety
Raise the level of awareness among
governments, industry, educators, children and guardians to ensure a
safe and secure online experience for children
Become the focal point of contact for child online safety in Africa and
for international partners
Develop, host and coordinate a pan-African online hotline reporting
and processing capacity
5. Why the need for ACOPEA
ICTs, Internet and mobile use is growing in Africa.
700 million mobile subscriptions.
200 million mobile broadband subscriptions.
400 million Internet users. (ITU Global Telecom Indicator 2012)
Online Risks for children
Child abuse images
Hate speech and violence
Grooming and Cyberbullying, live stream sexual abuse
Online reputation
Terrorism, blackmailing
No concrete Pan-African COP education and awareness model in Africa.
8. Global study-online risks to
children
Communicating online with someone they had never met face-to-face
Being exposed to user-generated content promoting anorexia, self-harm, drug-
taking or suicide.
Being exposed to sexual images online and misuse of personal data.
Going to meetings offline with people they first met online.
Being cyber-bullied and racism -1726 survey in Durban 1 in 3 - 42% said they were
cyberbullied, Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention (CJCP)2009.
Advertising is also thriving online, and children do not have a developed ability to
engage critically with it.
The use of internet is expanding for the recruitment of victims of trafficking in human
beings and advertising their services, including children.
10. What ACOPEA has done so far
Actively engaged international stakeholders and the private sector and
civil society
Identifying suitable education awareness resources available
internationally that can be scaled and transferred to the African
continent. e.g. the EU safer internet consortium INSAFE and CEOP
materials
Activated E-safety pilot initiative in Ethiopia - co-funded by Facebook
and the ITU as a model to be replicated in other countries in Africa.
11. ACOPEA Train the Trainer
model
Ambassado
rs
50
ACOPEA ThinkUKnow (TUK) trainers
12. Content of awareness materials
Introduction to COP, the issues and the ITU COP guidelines.
Staying up to date with popular technologies/applications that children
and young people use around the world.
Risks posed to young people.
Education response to COP, including methodology on how to deliver
the awareness material to key audiences stakeholders - professionals,
parents and lesson planes for children and young people.
How to report abuse and handle disclosure/the hotline response.
14. ACOPEA requires your support to achieve its objectives
To realize ACOPEA as a central pan African point of contact, a one stop shop for
Child online safety awareness in Africa.
Replicate the Ethiopian E-safety project in other parts of Africa
Expand the network of ACOPEA safety Ambassadors in Africa.
15. Conclusion
ACOPEA’s mission is to address the COP challenges
that come with Africa’s fast growing cyber expansion.
ACOPEA brings international knowledge and
experience to Africa to empower the next generation
of digital citizens in Africa.
All protocols duely observed. Today, young people are among the biggest user groups of online and mobile technologies in Africa. Internet and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) open a world of possibilities for children, expanding their horizons and providing opportunities to learn, create identities and participate in society. In parallel, however, ICT can also expose children and young people to risks that may be simply considered as the digital extension of existing offline threats. Measures that can protect them against these risks are not always easy to effectively migrate to a virtual and global digital environment.ITU's Child Online Protection (COP) initiative was launched in November 2008 as "a multi-stakeholder effort to bring together partners from all sectors of the global community to ensure a safe online experience for children everywhere." Guidelines have been prepared in the context of the Child Online Protection Initiative. These global guidelines have been developed by ITU and teams of contributing authors from leading institutions active in the ICT sector, with the aim to address the key actors. It is vital that all stakeholders are made aware of both the opportunities as well as the pitfalls that come with being online. it is in this framework of the desire to impliment the Cop initiative that ACOPEA was born as a balancing act to ensure the benefit outweighs the risks online for children so that children in Africa could enjoy the same good start in the their digital lifeas their counterparts in Europe and America.
I have a video from Prcellett.. The future starts here..
In the framework of the implementation of “ITU COP Guidelines for Children” the regional office for Africa in partnership with Facebook has conductedChild online protection Activities in Addis with a view to replicte this across Africa this year 2014-2017.A Facebook is supporting this pilot initiative financially, in partnership with the ITU and ACOPEA. All three parties have a strong interest in digital empowerment and want to ensure a safe and secure online experience for children and young people in Africa. The pilot will principally focus on Ethiopia though the parties have ambitions for it to lead to the development of ACOPEA as the executing arm of COP in Africa. To promote Africa-wide education and awareness activities on the importance of child online safety. Once this pilot concludes we would like to replicate this in other countries in Africa.
Although tis data is disaggregated to tell us mobile ownershp of children in Africa, The evidence points to growing online connectivity of children and young people. Although, levels of Internet access are highest in the industrialised world, Africa is fast catching up. In most countries for which data are available, children under the age of 18 make up a high percentage of the total number of people online. The youth bulge in Africa and the developing economies is becoming a core driver of networked children, who often referred to us digital natives. According to a report by The ITU Measuring the Information Society (MIS) Report 2013, young people are almost twice as networked as the global population as a whole. In the developing countries digital natives are vigorously leading their nation’s Internet use. With in the next five years, the digital native population will more than double. Children In Africa just like their counterparts in other pafts of the world are inhabiting the online invironment in
Mobile nd internet connections And tis will continue to grow. World bank forcasts . A billion Mobile by 2017Now in Africa mobile phones have a million applications, a camera, and so on, As a result of their increasing sophistication, phones have become serious bits of kit in Africa and around the world.
Social Networking and social media are growing in significance and have become an integral part of the digital lifestyle. When the terms ‘social networks’ and ‘social websites’ are used, the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all come to mind. But online research shows that there are a myriad of social networks that have been developed and introduced in Africa (many originating inSouth Africa), specifically to meet the requirements of local users.Some are focused particularly on regions, others encapsulate everything that the continent has to offer. Mxit (www.mxit.com)A formidable player in the social networking space, Mxit lives up to its reputation as a zone where people can blend a number of multi-media applications. Music and mobility are central themes on this site, and it offers the browser a number of facilities through which to engage fellow users.Interms of safety futures this sites do not compare with the likes of Facebook which many young people we spoke said is the safest for a simple reason is that they know how to report and has clear guidelines for safety of it’s use.. This does not exsit in many local social networks outlined here.
A quick reminder of the risks???Global research shows that across the world, notwithstanding considerable cross-country variation, the ranking of risks experienced is fairly similar in each country. In 2010 harvardUniversitBerknam with Unicef stated this similarity in the developing world, 4 in 10 children in Europe reported they had encountered one of this risks: communicating online with someone they had never met face-to-face; being exposed to user-generated content promoting anorexia, self-harm, drug-taking or suicide; being exposed to sexual images online and misuse of personal data; going to meetings offline with people they first met online; being cyber-bullied. New patterns of behaviour are also emerging, such as distributing footage, taken on a mobile phone’s camera, of physical assaults on other children or sending/receiving sexual images/messages to/from peers.New services with a potential impact on privacy, such as geo-localisation, are increasingly popular. Advertising is also thriving online, and children do not have a developed ability to engage critically with it. In addition, the use of internet is expanding for the recruitment of victims of trafficking in human beings and advertising their services, including children.. We are at the age of live stream of child abuse is a common place as we have found out last year in south Africa.. This risks would mean if a child is exposed that he would be at risk of not achieving in life and would not meet the developmental milestones expected of a healthy citizen…According to latest research by the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention (CJCP), one in three youngsters said they were victims of cyberbullying at school while 42 percent experienced cyberbullying outside of school. The study conducted with 1 726 youngsters in four provinces including Durban in 2009 but published recently, showed that just under half of all those surveyed were victims of cyberbullying. In the survey, a quarter of the youngsters experienced bullying via text messages on their cellphones. And one in five admitted to having bullied someone via text.
InAcopea we rely on research carried out internationaly on COP and in Africa by the likes of Unicef to understand the risks and trends of use of digital technologies by children in Africa so that it helps us collect real data accordingly to ensure our awareness is well informed.
Activated a pilot
ITU COP guidelines -Talk about guild lines
Eu Model= Internet is borderlessGlobal research -Commonalities of the risks posed
Acopea is a timely Project in Africa your support is key..to our success..
ACOPEA also works in dealing online violations in collaboration with international partners via our open email alias casework@acopea.org which is used to report online violations from around Africa- Reporting concerns and online violations. The primary aim for the open alias is for members of the government and regulatory communities to send high priority areas of violations and to deal with material in line with international community standards. These high priority areas include illegal images of children, hate speech, terrorism and grooming. We highly encourage you and your team to utilize this address to make us immediately aware of any content that exists on any social network or the internet which may be deemed illegal. With that said, we will be more than happy to accept other violations which were not acted upon, which do not necessarily fall into the aforementioned categories, including intellectual property infringments and so on.ACTION Team to act as there is a call for Action …