hivos: african crossroads collaboration grants

African Crossroads is a Pan African network that is inspired to collaborate to engage seasonally, critically reflecting and acting together on emerging issues across the continent. African Crossroads aims to tap into Africa’s vast potential and thrives on collective intelligence, cooperative action, and experimentation to positively shape the future of African societies.

Collaboration grants are intended to support and develop peer to peer learnings and skills exchange among creatives and tech entrepreneurs. Proposals are invited that contemplate collaboration and other forms of partnerships that will increase knowledge and capacities to achieve more together than each can accomplish alone.

The programme can award collaboration grants of up to 25,000 EUR to organisations and individuals, multidisciplinary hubs, and collectives that are working across arts practice, culture, heritage and technology to collaborate and deliver projects that speak to the following:

• The production of works that aim to build connections, and partnerships across North, East and Southern African countries.
• Project proposals that seek to share knowledge with wider groups and communities to exchange ideas.
• Project proposals that propel digital innovation and practice
• Projects that offer diversification of dialogue, debate and dissent in society referring to history, memory, challenging pre-dominant narratives and media in different disciplines.
• Projects can take the form of regional exchanges, exhibitions, installations, dialogues and production and presentation of new work across all creative art forms including music, literature, film and audiovisual, to be presented at the annual African Crossroads showcasing event in October 2023.
• Projects that focus on the following audio and visual disciplines: graphic design, fashion design, comics, cartoons, animation, comedy, satire, poetry, slam poetry, spoken word, storytelling, music, rap, hip hop, DJ-ing VJ-ing, radio shows, radio series, TV show, TV series, online TV show, TV series, sculpture (objects), vlogs, visual art (painting, drawing, printmaking, digital art), photography, feature film, documentary, mixed media, installation, performance, short film, video, virtual reality, and videogame.

Thematic areas of focus:

• Creative solidarity and interconnection.
• Responsibility and accountability of climate justice in Africa.
• Why popular cultural expressions matter: influences on gender and feminism.
• Creative expressions: challenging exclusionary beliefs and embodying new narratives.
• African Futurism: creating the Africa we want.