Each year on Safer Internet Day, millions of people join forces “Together for a better internet” to inspire positive change online, raise awareness of online safety issues, and participate in activities across the globe.

On Tuesday, 8 February 2022, we invite you to join the movement and help us ensure that the internet is a place of opportunities for children and young people where they can create, engage and share positively and freely.

Over the years, Safer Internet Day (SID) has become a landmark event in the online safety calendar. Starting as an initiative of the EU SafeBorders project in 2004 and taken up by the Insafe network as one of its earliest actions in 2005, Safer Internet Day has grown beyond its traditional geographic zone and is now celebrated in approximately 200 countries and territories worldwide.

Considering the nature of the Continent of Africa, in 2019 Child Online Africa made a rallying call to African countries to be issues dubbed Safer Internet Day Africa (SIDA) driven and focus on the global theme but contextualize the theme agreed to globally for impact. In 2020 at the Child Online Protection Forum organized by ITU Regional Office for Africa in partnership with the Ministry of Communications and Digitalization in Ghana, the coordination for the Safer Internet Day Africa was ceded to the ITU Regional Office for Africa and was renamed: Africa Safer Internet Day (ASID). Because this is a call for all Africans, it is expected that like-minded organizations across Africa will play their part to make the Internet better for ALL.

For this edition the focus will be on infrastructure and services rendered in countries to support the promotion of a better internet. This will be the launch of a community #ScoreCard and the conduct of focus group among different stakeholders to assess the effectiveness of services available at the local level for consumers. The solicited information from these discussions will be used to inform an advocacy strategy for a better service at the local level. To help meet the generational needs of everyone, there is going to be a Youth Summit as well as Safer Internet Forum. The forum is expected to take place on the 8th of February while the Youth Summit will be held on the 12th of February to make room for those who might be out in school to also have the opportunity to participate. We need to ensure that, collectively, we promote, protect, respect and fulfil the rights of all children and young people when they go online, and ASID 2022 will provide a focus for these efforts to be shared and discussed across Africa.