HumAngle Media, 24 Others Get Africa Transitional Justice Legacy Fund

HumAngle Media and 24 other African organisations have been announced as grantees for The Africa Transitional Justice Legacy Fund (@ATJLF_).

On Monday, ATJLF revealed that it was giving one million dollars in funding to 25 organisations from six West African countries to advance Transitional Justice (TJ) efforts in the sub-region.

As one of the grantees, HumAngle Media Limited will utilise community-generated media content for victims to share their stories as a way to increasing genuine awareness of their problems, thereby galvanising support from the wider public to participate in reconciliation and healing.

The project will mainstream community-level conversations about reconciliation into national public discourse by drawing from life experiences of victims in southern Borno who have lost their homes and livelihoods as a result of the ongoing Boko Haram conflict.

The grants were awarded to two organisations in Cote d’Ivoire, seven in The Gambia, four in Liberia, five in Mali, three in Nigeria and four in Sierra Leone.

According to the ATJLF, the grants are to enable organisations to continue their work on ensuring that transitional justice efforts do not get forgotten, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ranging from 10,000 dollars to 50,000 dollars per organisation, the grants will be implemented over a 12-month period and is expected to commence immediately.

The ATJLF is a grant-making initiative funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.

Administered by the Institute for Democratic Governance in Accra, Ghana, the fund is providing support to civil society, community-based, and survivor-led organisations in undertaking meaningful transitional justice initiatives in West Africa.

Speaking on the grantees, Makmid Kamara, Director of ATJLF, said, “We are pleased to increase the number of grantees this year by almost 50 per cent, from last year.

“This is testament to our commitment to ensuring that transitional justice interventions remain at the forefront of efforts to protect peace, democracy and preventing countries from sliding into conflicts and violence, especially at a time of unprecedented disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The 25 grants mark the second cohort of grant funded projects that will continue to strengthen existing interventions underway by ATJLF. The first set of grants were awarded in February, 2020.

The awarded projects will seek to contribute to amplifying the agency of victims and survivors of conflicts and mass human rights violations in West Africa.

This cohort will also augment ATJLF’s ambition to support issues such as community reconciliation and communal healing in the sub-region.

The funding and technical support to these groups and organisations during this ongoing pandemic will help cushion the effects that COVID-19 is having on field operations and community interventions of particularly smaller organisations.

It will also offer an opportunity for innovation in efforts to minimise the negative impacts of COVID19 in communities and societies across West Africa.

“Individually and collectively, all the awarded projects support ATJLF’s strategic vision for knowledge incubation around transitional justice in the continent,” said Idayat Hassan, Chair of the ATJLF Advisory Committee.

“In this round, we have funded projects that speak to the core transitional justice issues we want to address in each of the focus countries.

“We hope that the successful grantees will now hit the ground running to ensure that we collaboratively promote truth, justice and accountability by putting victims and survivors at the heart of the respective interventions,” Hassan added.