We are excited to welcome Elizabeth Chikapa to Lanfrica as our Community Engagement Curator (CEC)! Her passion for community building, enthusiasm, skills, and dedication truly stand out and will play a pivotal role in expanding our reach and making a positive impact on the “underground communities” we aim to serve.
Motivation
Lanfrica is on a mission to enable a community of “builders”. We are pushing the boundaries of “AI creators” beyond programmers, computer scientists, and geeky people writing code. We strongly believe that AI creators are essentially “builders”: people who build AI in some form (platforms, software, tech, ideas, etc) to facilitate research and improve lives. Finally, we believe that anyone can be a builder!
The difference between two people’s lives, especially in Africa, can be solely the access to information that they have. Knowing about a scholarship application could be the difference between studying (abroad) on a scholarship and not being able to study because your parents can not afford education. The list goes on… At Lanfrica, we have discovered that the “underground communities” do not have access to important information that could change their lives. People are indeed living in information bubbles, and many people in what we term “underground communities” do not have access to information about opportunities.
At Lanfrica we want to expand the reach of information to “underground communities”. We believe that by bringing useful information to the awareness of people in these communities, we could significantly improve lives in these communities, and create sustainable progress.
The Role of the Community Engagement Coordinator (CEC)
For the next six months, the primary responsibility of the Community Engagement Coordinator is to bridge the gap between valuable information and often-overlooked communities, especially those operating “underground.” In the short term, this means actively sharing opportunities, application calls, news, and other useful updates with these communities. The CEC may either receive key information to share or independently discover relevant content. In both cases, they are responsible for making the content engaging and easy to understand—often using graphic design to enhance accessibility—and distributing it through the appropriate channels. Additionally, the CEC will be involved in creating posters for events and may take on other related activities as they arise throughout their term.
The vision
- Identify and connect with underground communities.
- Provide information access to these communities.
- Long term goal: build a network of underground communities across Africa
We are starting with our WhatsApp community and our Telegram community (comprising users, teachers, linguists, native speakers, enthusiasts, etc).
