Open Society Institute for Eastern Africa:
COVID-19 and Eastern Africa’s Stories of Innovation, Resilience and Solidarity
Timelines/Duration: This will run for three months – September, October and November 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken all aspects of our lives. This spans health, economic, political, social to overall wellbeing. In the midst of all these, the people of Eastern Africa are showing great promise in the way they are responding to this pandemic, including communities banding together to support each other through this very strange times. Many Eastern African countries have ignited their innovative instincts and have been able to take measures to bridge the medical supplies and protective gears gaps in some ways.. Governments have turned to local manufacturers and innovators to bridge these gaps. Young people in Universities are innovating to produce ventilators, community members are using their skills to produce face masks that they are distributing to community members that cannot afford them, while communities in low resourced neighborhoods are banding together to support each other to access food, sanitation services and other social amenities. Helplines are being established to support gender-based violence victims, while efforts are being made by communities to raise awareness to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in communities.
These are the stories reverberating across all Eastern Africa communities—the stories of innovation, resilience and solidarity.
Our Call and Purpose
As the Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa, we would like to capture these stories in different forms to inspire communities across the region and enable learning and action even as we race against time to battle the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating impacts.
We are therefore calling on creatives across Eastern Africa – Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Rwanda—to share with us a concept note on how they might capture these stories.
These could be captured as creatively written pieces, photo stories, short video stories, poems, creative designs, artistic expressions or simply podcast conversations among others.
These will cover innovations in the fight against COVID-19, how communities are coping despite the challenges posed by COVID-19, the initiatives by communities to contribute towards the fight against COVID-19, the resilience in the face of the pandemic among others.
Our Approach
We will pick two creatives per country who will submit five stories each (to have 10 stories per country) on different aspects of COVID-19 pandemic. The successful creatives will use different media to present the stories for diversity—integrating photo/short video clips to the written formats, arts among others. These stories will also cover diverse settings to ensure differentiation in terms of the experiences, coping mechanisms and responses.
How to Bid
Submit a concept giving examples of stories you would like to tell regarding COVID-19 in Eastern Africa that demonstrate innovation, resilience and solidarity. Indicate in what format you would wish to tell the story and the budget/how much it would cost you to tell the story. The concept should be 500 words or less. You can suggest up to five story ideas.
Submit the concept to romondi@osiea.org and wngunjiri@osiea.org by August 14, 2020.
