Thank you for laying out these plans Karolina and for all the work you do!
We’d like to add to the following point:
There will likely be new promising organizations and projects coming out of incubators — estimated RFMF over the next 12 months: $500k
We’re running a training programme that is very similar to Welfare Matters’, just focused on Africa. We pivoted to this intervention last year based on our experience of working with early stage orgs / advocates that were in the process of starting their orgs—most importantly Daniel Abiliba / AWL and Paul Ssuna / AWeCCAwho were both funded by the EA AWF as a result.
A few months ago, we completed the first cohort of our new programme—now focusing explicitly on individuals and incubation instead of existing orgs. This has been promising so far and we’re about to start the second cohort next week. Since the start of this new programme, we’ve incubated three new projects/orgs:
Research to understand the most important welfare issues for farmed fish in Uganda and piloting an intervention to address the most important issue in collaboration with farmers (website to be built)
The first two received seed funding directly from us, totalling USD 53K. If their pilots turn out to be promising, we hope for these initiatives to successfully fundraise themselves—EA AWF would be a primary option for this. The third one received USD 27K in funding from EA AWF already for their pilot (not seed funded by us).
In addition to these projects, we’ll likely soon incubate another project/org focused on cage-free campaigns in Zambia, the first one of its kind in the country, led by another one of our programme participants.
You and the fund managers will be the judge whether these projects/orgs are actually promising, but we wanted to flag this here, since:
More projects will come out of our next cohort.
The projects that we seed fund(ed) directly may go on to fundraise from EA AWF.
EA AWF has so far funded all of the projects we’ve actively incubated and did not seed fund ourselves (n=3).
We’re not talking about huge amounts here, since we typically advise our participants to start lean and costs are generally fairly low in Africa compared to other parts of the world. But we think there is potential to grow further in this area. We’ll give a more detailed update in our 2024 review which we plan to publish on the forum in a few weeks.
Thank you for laying out these plans Karolina and for all the work you do!
We’d like to add to the following point:
We’re running a training programme that is very similar to Welfare Matters’, just focused on Africa. We pivoted to this intervention last year based on our experience of working with early stage orgs / advocates that were in the process of starting their orgs—most importantly Daniel Abiliba / AWL and Paul Ssuna / AWeCCA who were both funded by the EA AWF as a result.
A few months ago, we completed the first cohort of our new programme—now focusing explicitly on individuals and incubation instead of existing orgs. This has been promising so far and we’re about to start the second cohort next week. Since the start of this new programme, we’ve incubated three new projects/orgs:
Policy advocacy for pre-slaughter stunning regulations in Ghana
Research to understand the most important welfare issues for farmed fish in Uganda and piloting an intervention to address the most important issue in collaboration with farmers (website to be built)
Policy advocacy for animal welfare standards for chickens and fish in Uganda
The first two received seed funding directly from us, totalling USD 53K. If their pilots turn out to be promising, we hope for these initiatives to successfully fundraise themselves—EA AWF would be a primary option for this. The third one received USD 27K in funding from EA AWF already for their pilot (not seed funded by us).
In addition to these projects, we’ll likely soon incubate another project/org focused on cage-free campaigns in Zambia, the first one of its kind in the country, led by another one of our programme participants.
You and the fund managers will be the judge whether these projects/orgs are actually promising, but we wanted to flag this here, since:
More projects will come out of our next cohort.
The projects that we seed fund(ed) directly may go on to fundraise from EA AWF.
EA AWF has so far funded all of the projects we’ve actively incubated and did not seed fund ourselves (n=3).
We’re not talking about huge amounts here, since we typically advise our participants to start lean and costs are generally fairly low in Africa compared to other parts of the world. But we think there is potential to grow further in this area. We’ll give a more detailed update in our 2024 review which we plan to publish on the forum in a few weeks.