2014 ISIF Asia Grant applications close 9 August

An ISIF Asia Grant can help you get your project off the ground and increase your organization’s potential to attract additional donors to continue or upscale your project’s implementation.

If you are working on an initiative to improve communications and information infrastructure for your local community and you need some funds to continue with your hard work, there is still time to apply for a 2014 ISIF Asia Grant! ISIF Asia gives grants of up to AUD 30,000 to projects that will be implemented in the Asia Pacific region within a 3 to 12 month period. 

Successful proposals will be aligned with the following categories:

1. Innovation on access provision: This category focus on innovative solutions providing low cost deployment with low power consumption and low maintenance to expand fixed and mobile access to the Internet, information services and/or applications in your community. Innovation should not necessarily be technical, it could refer to organizational/business arrangements that support access provision, or improve the quality of access through accessibility or linguistic diversity.

2. Innovation on learning and localization: This category covers capacity building and localization efforts, which are key to improve the skills needed to design, maintain, and manage ICT infrastructure and services in local languages. Localized projects support local talent and create job opportunities in rural or urban marginalized areas. Your innovative, open, inclusive, and sustainable approach to learning and language diversity are key elements to guarantee access to information that is needed to offer reliable services and applications to your community.

3. Code for the common good: This category includes applications and other software solutions that enable communities in a variety of ways. High mobile penetration in the Asia Pacific region has been a catalyst in the development of mobile-based services, applications and software solutions. These solutions have been used to support timely and relevant information dissemination on a large scale using a range of network infrastructures through a variety of devices, even where literacy rates are lower. Mobile technologies have enabled communities to increase participation in political processes, coordinate efforts during emergency situations, receive extreme weather alerts, communicate with remote health services, and receive specialized patient referrals, among many other applications.

4. Rights: This category supports the strategic use of Internet tools and services to promote freedom of expression, freedom of association, protects privacy, security, consumers’ rights, gender equality, new forms of intellectual property in the digital environment, and a wider range of issues related to the Internet and human rights.

In addition to the grant, 3 of the ISIF Asia 2014 grant recipients will be selected to receive additional mentoring on evaluation and research communication through a partnership between ISIF Asia and the project ”Developing Evaluation & Communication Capacity in Information Society Research (DECI-2)”. Teams will acquire valuable knowledge and skills that their organizations will be able to use not only for the ISIF Asia supported project but to their organizations as a whole. For more information about the DECI-2 project, visit: http://evaluationandcommunicationinpractice.ca/

For Details of the ISIF Asia Grant Applications, please visit http://isif.asia/grant & contact info@isif.asia.