Witness The immediate objectives that the ON grant will contribute to are:

i.	Enhancing WITNESSs presence and engagement in Africa and the Middle East
ii.	Increasing WITNESSs digital and physical security capacity

(i)	Enhancing WITNESSs presence and engagement in Africa and the Middle East

Oxfam Novibs support will strengthen WITNESSs presence in Africa and the Middle East, its direct engagement with video-for-change activists in those two regions, and enhance its capacity and resources to support them in response to their specific needs.

In Africa, for example, where WITNESS has just announced the launch of a new Video-for-Change Africa Network, WITNESS staff will seek to strengthen this new network, collaborate with it to share and use at the local level- the training materials developed by WITNESS, and to surface best practices.  The stronger on-the-ground presence and engagement will facilitate better and faster information flow with the WITNESS Main Office, to help it respond more pointedly and accurately to the needs of video-for-change activists in Africa, and to be able to respond to emerging situations where intensive support may be required by human rights defenders.

Activities under this objective during the 2-years covered by the proposal are:

-	Identify and respond to at least 2 emerging human rights crisis situations in Africa and the Middle East per year
-	Provide direct training to activists / networks in the two regions (2 times per year)
-	Translate, adapt, and / or deploy a minimum of 2  3 resources tailored to regional needs per year
-	Participate in 1-2 convenings of regional video-for-change leaders per year (the first such convening, which concluded with the launch of a Video-for-Change network in Africa, took place in S. Africa earlier this month)

(ii)	Increasing WITNESSs digital and physical security capacity

While the phenomenal spread of new communications technologies are enabling more and more people to bear witness and to use social media for the exercise of their freedom of expression, the use of visual media (video and photographs shotwith video cameras and mobile devices) carries risks: identification of protestors and users of visual media through crowd-sourcingand facial recognition technology.

An important component of WITNESSs work is to mitigate those risks and to offer advice to activists and users so that they increase their own safety and the safety of the people they interview or those who appear in their footage.  In its trainings and in the online resources it provides, WITNESS focuses on issues of safety, security, and consent; it also continues its engagement in the further development of the InformaCam app  (which is a mechanism to verify and authenticate [video] footage. The app leverages the sensors used in modern smartphones to create a snapshot of the environment in which a piece of media is captured. This information is used, along with a digital fingerprint of the cameraphone sensor, to sign the video or image and ensure that the media hasnt been tampered. It also verifies that it was captured by a specific device at a specific time and place) and ObscuraCam, which allows users to blur or obfuscate faces in photos and videos .  WITNESS has also been advocating, and continues to advocate toward youtube to integrate elements into its site that allow protective anonymization, and toward other technology companies to incorporate similar human-rights-friendly frameworks into their services .

The Oxfam Novib grant will help WITNESSincrease its digital and physical security capacity and, by extension, strengthen the same for the partners and activists the organisations works with or supports.  WITNESS will hold more sophisticated digital security training for its key staff.  It will also designate two technical staff members to develop their knowledge and expertise in this field and to use that to actively evaluate technology solutions and risk assessments, which would be tailored to the emerging human rights situations coming out of Africa and the MENA regions .