Initiative for Digital Rights in Latin America (INDELA)

As we increasingly conduct our lives online, our digital rights, particularly the rights to privacy and freedom of expression, are becoming more important. We need to understand how our data is used by companies and governments. Policymakers everywhere are only now debating and proposing some necessary, if incomplete, legislative fixes, while citizens and stakeholders are beginning to understand their rights and vulnerabilities in the online environment. Meanwhile, the multinational technology sector has cornered data-driven business models to fuel their market expansion, while governments are improving their surveillance capacities. Now is the time to be monitoring and educating to ensure fundamental rights are protected in law and practice. This is very pertinent in Latin America, where there are too few institutions capable of mounting the sustained efforts necessary to promote and defend rights or develop ecosystems that support policy debates. The digital rights policy ecosystem needs to develop, establish stronger cross-regional linkages, and attract more varied sources of support. In addition, the mechanisms for coordinating regional initiatives need to be less haphazard.

The Initiative for Digital Rights in Latin America/Iniciativa por los Derechos Digitales en Latinoamérica (INDELA) is a three-year collaborative re-granting/funding arrangement intended to strengthen and support the digital rights ecosystem in Latin America. It ensures a consistent pool of funding to support institutional capacity building needs and to tackle current challenges and opportunities of digital rights in Latin America. The INDELA Fund has three overarching goals: to equip digital rights actors, to promote collaboration between organizations, and to strengthen coordination among funders and organizations in the region.

Based on identifying existing shared priorities among different funders and organizations in the digital rights field, the Fund will prioritize projects that promise to deliver specific results on issues that include privacy; freedom of expression (including content regulation, internet shutdowns, net neutrality, and “fake news”); accountability of governments and corporations; and access to knowledge (including copyright reform). Funding can support policy work, advocacy, campaigning, public awareness, action-oriented research, and protecting and promoting digital rights.